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Another day, another US academic dives head-first into the nerdfest that is the 33 1/3 series of classic album studies. This time, it’s Glenn Hendler, Professor of English at Fordham University, who takes the plunge. And the album he chooses to write his dissertation, sorry, book about is Diamond Dogs. Bowie dismissed the record in later years as “my usual basket of apocalyptic visions,” and with its uneasy marriage of George Orwell and William Burroughs shoehorned into its overarching ‘concept’ there’s always been an air of cut and shut about the 1974 release. Hendler acknowledges the defects and shifts his analytical brain in gear to explore the album’s every nook. Much of his musing is entertaining, it’s never anything less than passionate and often compelling. There are certain blind alleys, such as the way Bowie alters how he addresses the audience in his songs (the so-called ‘I/You dynamic’), that you wish he had never stumbled down. But that’s not to detract from the miracle of endurance that witnesses one man writing so much about a single album.