Beneath The Underdog is the partially fictionalized autobiography of the great jazz composer and bassist, Charles Mingus. It has a somewhat controversial reputation, but I wasn't expecting it to have the smallest music quotient of any musician biography I've ever read. It's a good read though, sort of a combination of a beat novel and James Ellroy, with lots of Southern California underbelly -- sex, guns, pimps, hookers, troubled relationships, a troubled soul. The frontispiece notes: "Some names in this work have been changed and some of the characters and incidents are fictitious." Sorting it all out is impossible for us now, and probably irrelevant. I suppose the important thing is that this is how he felt about his life -- it does seem as though writing it may have been a form of self-therapy.