Category: Book Reviews

Posted on: April 13, 2019 Posted by: James McQuiston Comments: 0

Ira Kaufman & Velimir Srića – The World is Broken, We Need to Fix It: Path to Strategic Harmony

The most notable facet of this book, for me, is its lack of a dogmatic or partisan point of view. Ira Kaufman and Velimir Srića’s The World is Broken, We Need to Fix It: Path to Strategic Harmony acknowledges and examines the many challenges humanity faces nearly twenty years into the 21st century, but it never latches onto a particular school of political thought, but rather takes a broad-based humanistic…

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Posted on: March 21, 2019 Posted by: Kim Muncie Comments: 0

Greg Kieser discusses the ever growing, ever evolving presence of technology via new book – Dear Machine

The ever growing, ever evolving presence of technology in our lives means we will be seeing works like Greg Kieser’s Dear Machine: A Letter to a Super-Aware Intelligent Machine (SAIM) more. This slim tome, barely exceeding one hundred pages when you take out extraneous material like title pages and whatnot, nevertheless takes on an enormous mandate – Kieser structures the work as a “letter” composed to a future intelligent and “aware” machine…

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Posted on: December 7, 2018 Posted by: John B. Moore Comments: 0

World Domination: The Sub Pop Records Story (RPM Series)

You’d be hard pressed to find a recent musical genre that’s been dissected more in the past two decades than Grunge. Countless books, articles, documentaries, and radio and TV interviews dig into the Seattle-based phenomenon and just about every single discussion on the topic eventually comes around to the ground-breaking indie label Sub Pop. So, it’s surprising there was any new material left to report about the label, let alone…

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Posted on: September 25, 2018 Posted by: John B. Moore Comments: 0

The Hard Stuff: Dope, Crime, The MC5 & My Life of Impossibilities

Wayne Kramer and his bandmates in the MC5 helped put down the foundations of punk rock, alongside fellow Detroiters Iggy Pop and The Stooges, paving the way for everyone from The Ramones to The Clash to make careers out of their music. Unfortunately, Kramer was in a federal prison in Lexington, KY, serving time for a botched drug deal when punk was just taking off. And at the time, the…

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Posted on: May 23, 2018 Posted by: John B. Moore Comments: 0

The Clash: All The Albums, All The Songs

The Clash’s record label once dubbed the group as “the only band that matters” in the promotional materials introducing them to the U.S. and while the phrase was certainly polarizing at the time, you can’t help but find their influence stronger today than ever before. Whether it was adding strong, sing-able melodies to punk rock – heard in bands like Green Day and every Green Day clone since; their strong…

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Posted on: April 30, 2018 Posted by: James McQuiston Comments: 0

Lemon Jail: On the Road with The Replacements by Bill Sullivan

Over the years, Bill Sullivan has served as tour manager for bands like Soul Asylum, Bright Eyes, Yo La Tengo, The New Pornographers and many more. All were clearly a walk in the park, compared to his first gig in music, a roadie for The Replacements, quite possibly the most self-destructive band in the history of rock.

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Posted on: March 15, 2018 Posted by: John B. Moore Comments: 0

The Yacht Rock Book

Ah, Yacht Rock – the guiltiest of all the musical guilty pleasures. That 1970s soft rock sound best associated with Southern California (though the bands were from all over). Think linen sportscoats and espadrilles; soft jazz, clean vocals, catchy hooks and maybe a little white boy R&B. Kenny Loggins? Yup; Hall & Oates? Sure thing; Christopher Cross? Are you kidding me? He had a song called “Sailing,” so, yeah; Rupert…

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