Book Review: Play It Loud: An Epic History of the Style, Sound & Revolution of the Electric Guitar (2016). Brad Tolinski & Alan Di Perna.

This book is a surprisingly engaging cultural, musical and technical history of the electric guitar.  It includes stories of the individuals who designed and built the iconic guitar models, the companies they created, the trend-setting musicians who used and altered the guitars, and what it all meant. 

It is interesting that there is or was an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in New York and then at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with the similar name “Play It Loud: The Instruments of Rock and Roll” which by sheer cosmic luck I was able to attend on the opening day (at the Met) in 2019.  It is full of the actual instruments played by many great rock stars, many of them much the worse for wear. 

I don’t know if the exhibition still exists, or whether this book was in any way connected to it (other than by the fact that it covers much of the same history), but you can still find references and some videos online related to this marvelous museum collection of instruments.

A fun read for any electric guitar player or recent American music and social history fan. Recommended.

Book Review: Cloud Cuckoo Land (2021). Anthony Doerr.

Anthony Doerr’s previous novel, All the Light We Cannot See (2014), won numerous well-deserved literary awards and accolades.  His new novel, Cloud Cuckoo Land, continues to demonstrate his mastery of story-telling in the modern novel, but with an ambition and reach that is astonishing and miraculous.    

 

How to even describe a plot like this, or to say what it is about?   At its core, it is about books, libraries, and the preservation of stories and the earth through the generations, and the efforts that people take to try protect books and our history against the ravages of time, wars, floods, disasters and human follies.  But it is so much more profound than that.

 

The novel’s plot skips back and forth between individuals and small communities across history, from antiquity and the Greek age, to the siege of Constantinople in 1453, to America in the 1900s and 2000s, to the Korean War, and to a human space ark in the near future, heading for a new habitable planet light years away.  And in each time and place, there is one common element: an obscure, ancient book containing the tale of a fool who travels far, and becomes a donkey, a fish and a bird, before returning home in the end.  

 

I had to admit to being a little skeptical when I read the plot summary on the book jacket.   How could such a convoluted set of people and places have a readable plot or allow us to build any emotional connection to the characters?   But this is where Doerr’s story-telling wizardry comes in.  The characters with all their human failures and weaknesses, their difficult circumstances, and their seemingly doomed attempts to learn, to become wiser, to survive, and to somehow preserve the continuity of the human story, were both believable and lovable in the very best sense.

 

This is the kind of rare story where you’re desperate to know what happens next, and how it will end as you’re reading it, but you also don’t want it to end, because you’ve become so attached to the characters and their lives. 

 

It reminded me of Richard Powers’ master work of 2018, The Overstory, in several important respects:  its somber but deeply caring inclusion of humanity’s headlong run toward ruining our home planet’s environment as a major theme, its portrayal of the power of the human spirit to try to keep fighting against the eternal challenges and setbacks of the human condition, and its use of the narrative trick of separately telling multiple stories of different lives in different times and places, only to somehow bring all the threads of these stories together into a coherent whole by the end.

 

A marvelous book, which left me somehow happier and more hopeful after I’d read it, even with all the sad events and powerful truths that are part of the story.  One of the best novels I’ve read in memory.  Very highly recommended.

Book Review: The Spymaster of Baghdad (2021). Margaret Coker.

This excellent account by a notable U.S. war correspondent tells the personal stories of several families and individual Iraqis caught up in surviving the post-US invasion period of sectarian violence in Iraq, followed by the rise of ISIS, and the war against them by Iraqis, Kurds and U.S. supporters.  

At the center of the story is an Iraqi man who became brilliant at identifying ISIS terrorists and constructing maps of their social networks, with the help of his older brother, the disgraced “oldest son” of the family, who went underground for more than a year in the ISIS movement to gather critical information about the terrorists, their organization and their bombing campaigns.  

Their paths are contrasted with a bright young woman from another family, who was driven by her rage toward the American invasion and its violent sectarian aftermath to become a leader in the ISIS movement, despite their appalling treatment of herself and other women. 

This is a thrilling, disturbing and powerful account of how the Iraqi people and their society were impacted by the U.S. invasion and occupation, and some of the ways they chose to fight for their very different versions of a better world for their families and communities.  Recommended.