With a Ph.D. and a tenure as a professor of literature behind him, Rolling Stone editor Anthony DeCurtis is not a typical rock critic. His best work provides a model of professional, intelligent, non-self-indulgent rock writing, and Rocking My Life Away compiles some of that work. The high points—which include a prescient 1981 look at Athens, Georgia's music scene and the inexplicably rejected liner notes for Phil Spector's box set Back To Mono—are exemplary pieces. Much of Rocking My Life Away's material, however, originally appeared in Rolling Stone in the late '80s/early '90s and reflects both the positive and negative aspects of that period in the publication's history. Articles on 10,000 Maniacs, U2, and R.E.M. written at the height of the bands' careers all remain interesting. The same can't be said, however, for a 1990 piece on The Rolling Stones commemorating the group's selection as "Artist Of The Year." DeCurtis does nothing to question the validity of the title—were the Steel Wheels album and tour really the most important musical happenings of the previous year?—and allows Jagger and Richards to spend most of the article discussing such rockin' topics as the economic difficulties of touring Europe. Just as questionable, especially in light of the chilly years that followed, is DeCurtis' unqualified praise—in a 1989 article mostly about the horrors of censorship—of the Gay Men's Health Crisis' decision to pull the plug on a Guns N' Roses benefit concert in its name. This is, of course, due to Axl's Rose's infamous racist and homophobic lyric to "One In A Million." But DeCurtis, who elsewhere in the same article notes that "rock 'n' roll has drawn much of its power from its willingness to express the forbidden idea, to say the thing that should not be said, to shock," doesn't give any space to Rose's defense of the objectionable lines, however lame that defense may have been. Dated pieces, such as one on the hot campus reads of 1989, are dispensable, and when DeCurtis does get personal, he's considerably less engaging. The author's main flaw, though, is that his conservative writing style works more consistently than his conservative choice of subjects, which begins to bore after a while. Otherwise, it's an interesting collection, and DeCurtis an insightful, intelligent guide.