Cornel Bonca offers thoughtful insight into the life of the genius singer, songwriter, musician, and entertainer that is Jackson Browne while never forgetting it's all about the music. I highly recommend it.

Dicky Barrett, frontman and songwriter for The Mighty Mighty BossTones and The Defiant

A lyrical, fiercely intelligent book which places Jackson Browne in his proper context. Like all talented writers who venture to write about music, Bonca is unafraid to explore what the music did to him, personally-how it morphed his point of view and introduced him to a faraway world. Through Bonca's ferocious intellect and elegant prose, we see the brilliance of one of the great songwriters of the twentieth century, the fractured America which gave him voice and-most of all-a glimpse of ourselves as we marvel at the beauty wrought from its failures.

Mikel Jollett, frontman and songwriter, The Airborne Toxic Event; author, Hollywood Park: A Memoir

In lively, accessible prose, Cornel Bonca explores Jackson Browne's fifty-year career, persuasively demonstrating that Browne's music and political commitments had their roots in the liberal humanism of the California counterculture of the 1960s. In a far-reaching work that is equally about Browne, the author's own fifty-year engagement with Browne's music, and, perhaps more than anything, about the slow-fading reverberations of the 1960s, Bonca depicts Browne and his music as cultivated by a sincere commitment to the universal human values.

Stephen Mexal, author of The Conservative Aesthetic and Reading for Liberalism

The Permanent Holdout is … a thoughtful exploration of how one artist came to shape another person's life. [Cornel] Bonca is the proxy for the rest of us, and as a guide to Browne's music, he is a fine one as we go through the singer's creative ups and downs. Fans of Jackson Browne should enjoy this one-man excavation of his work.

Booklist Reviews

Bonca's book on Browne is an excellent addition to the literature on this important US artist because Bonca not only provides another lens through which we can revisit the albums and biographical highlights but also brings us up to date on the output of this still active singer, songwriter, and activist.

Notes: the Quarterly Journal of the Music Library Association