Bob Spitz

It is rare for someone to emerge in America who can change our attitudes, our beliefs, and our very culture. It is even rarer when that someone is a middle-aged, six-foot three-inch woman whose first exposure to an unsuspecting public is cooking an omelet on a hot plate on a local TV station. And yet, that is exactly what Julia Child did. The warble voiced doyenne of television cookery became an iconic cult figure and joyous rule breaker as she touched...

No one before or since has lived the rock star dream quite like Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, John Paul Jones, and John Bonham. Spitz separates the myth from the reality, starting with the opening notes of their first album as the band announced itself as a collision of grand artistic ambition and brute primal force, of English folk music and hard-driving African-American blues. Taken together, Led Zeppelin's discography has spent an almost incomprehensible...