Yes, there are plenty of U2 bios out there – some good, some dreadful and a couple pretty great; There are also a number of hardcover, coffee table-sized books on the band out there, but music journalist Mat Snow has found a way to marry the two, pulling together a pretty solid, overreaching bio on the band and packaging it in a beautiful, three-and-a-half pound book crammed with fantastic photos…
Admittedly the appeal for this book is a little narrow. That being said, if you’re a Star Wars fan, My God, this coffee table is nirvana between two covers!
Let’s get this out of the way up front: yes, it does seem odd that someone has written a bio on a band that was around for just over a decade; and a band that is (rightfully or not) maligned for their connection to the watered-down nu-Emo genre (I actually think a lot of the criticism is misdirected as the band were closer to Glam than they were Emo). It’s…
Poor Andrew Earles. In, Gimme Indie Rock, his impressive new reference guide to Indie Rock, he managed to target a book squarely at the same crowd that will devour it in one reading, then spend endless hours online bitching about the records that were and were not deemed “essential.”
If you quickly answer “Blink 182!” when asked about your favorite punk band, this book is probably not meant for you. But for those with a burning desire to dig deeper than The Clash and Sex Pistols to discover below-the-radar groups from the original British punk rock scene, then Burning Britain is your new Bible.
Dennis Lehane is no stranger to Hollywood, having seen his books Mystic River, Gone Baby Gone and Shutter Island all make their way from the bookshelf to movie screen. The Drop is different only in the time it has taken for it to hit theaters, coming out as a book and a movie at the same time.
If you’re in your late 30s to mid-40s, reading this review and don’t cop to listening to a little Ratt or Bon Jovi in your teens; Slamming a Poison or Motley Crue cassette into your car’s tape deck, then you were either raised Amish or you’re very likely, completely full of shit. There is almost no way you could have been a teenager in the ‘80s and not spent a…
I will preface this review with an admission: I know very little about kickboxing. I don’t know about any of the athletes; I know nothing about how it’s scored; and I have little interest in watching it. Despite all of that, Mark Miller’s memoir is utterly fascinating. His story is raw and emotional enough to touch anyone with even a little interest in human resilience.
You thought your job today was hard? Imagine trying to write book about the highly influential, but notoriously litigious political punk band the Dead Kennedys – a group that seemingly thrives on trading insults at each other. That was the task faced by music journalist Alex Ogg and he managed to pull it off quite impressively with the absorbing Dead Kennedys: Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables, The Early Years.
Former war correspondent and current surf writer Chas Smith is almost daring you not to like his writing. He’s arrogant, smug overly-opinionated, focuses too much on style over substance (how surfers dress and whether or not they’re attractive holds much more weight for Smith than something as obvious as… well, how they surf). But damn, the guy knows how to write a fascinating story.
British novelist Tom Rob Smith is best known for his award-winning Child 44 series, but The Farm, his latest book, is certain to continue to the parade of acclaim and likely bring with it a bigger audience. The book, which grabs your attention very early on, focuses on Daniel, struggling in his career, still in the closet to his parents and slightly guilty for not having visited them since they…
Peter Hook, known best as the co-founder and bassist for the wildly influential bands Joy Division and New Order, can also add fledgling club co-owner to his CV. In The Hacienda: How Not to Run a Club, Hook goes into hilarious detail reliving the disastrous experience he, his New Order band mates and his label bosses at Factory Records had in starting and running into the ground this popular Manchester…
Even if you don’t know your Kajagoogoo from your Yaz, this oral history of New Wave is entertaining enough to suck up the next few hours of your life, regardless of your relationship with the genre. Culled from countless interviews by music journalists Lori Majewski and Jonathan Bernstein, Mad World captures bands big (Duran Duran, The Psychedelic Furs) and obscure (The Normal, Ultravox) in this run down of the music…
Always the bridesmaid… Seattle-based rockers Mudhoney were there at the very beginning of the grunge movement, marrying punk rock and metal. Shit, Mudhoney frontman Mark Arm was one of the first to bring the obscure term “grunge” to Seattle using it as a tongue-in-cheek derogatory description of one of his earlier bands in a letter to a local rock magazine. Nirvana, the ultimate lottery winners of the genre, worshipped Mudhoney,…
There are so many childrens’ titles that are released on a regular basic that it becomes extremely hard to separate the wheat from the chaff. Kim Cameron has a title that should be purchased by parents that wish to provide their children with imaginative settings and challenging (but ultimately approachable) reading. The physical and audio versions of this book are two different entities, as Kim has provided music and…
Jennifer Adan has just released a book, I Don’t See Heaven. The title provides children with methods of coping after the death of a loved one. Isabella gets on a flight with her family – a baby brother, mother, and father. After all the years of being told that her grandfather is up in Heaven, looking down at her, Isabella cannot see him amongst the clouds. This is a…
It would be easy to dismiss Here We Are Now as just one final opportunity for Seattle writer and Kurt Cobain biographer Charles Cross to go back one last time to see if any money was left on the table. But in doing so, you’d miss out on one of the more thoughtful studies on the impact Cobain, and in many cases his scene mates in Olympia and Seattle,…
Yes, there are bookshelves lined with bios about Bob Dylan – including a planned-three volume autobiography from the singer. But journalist Donald Brown approached American Troubadour, the latest Dylan book, in a completely original fashion, looking at the cultural landscape surrounding the release of each album. While many of the stories of Dylan’s life have been dissected ad nausea in just about every bit of medium imaginable, Brown’s approach is refreshing;…
One of the best noir books to come out in years was penned by the culture editor for The New York Times Magazine. Shovel Ready is just as sly and witty as it is dark and ominous. The man character is Spademan, a Jersey-bred former garbage man living in the not too distant future, where the streets of New York are almost abandoned except for those too poor to move…
Metal may be the most maligned musical genre out there. But regardless of whether you think its rep is well-deserved or wholly unfair, there is no denying the powerful visual images that have been associated with it from the beginning, seen everywhere from album covers to black concert T’s. From the iconic Zombie-like figure of Eddie, Iron Maiden’s mascot, to the Misfits skull beaming from the front of t-shirts going…