Subcultures Books

In short, I was moderately disappointed in this book. I gave it a 3rd star simply because I sympathize to some extent with the object of the book: the nerd. I was not a nerd in school, but I am definitely a geek. As another reviewer noted, the author did a substandard job in delineating the differences between geeks, nerds, dorks, etc.

Overall, the book was not an enjoyable read. It came off as too academic. I enjoy serious, academic books most of the time, but did not buy this book with that expectation in mind.

What someone needs to write is a real geek memoir, not this ethnographic treatise. Perhaps that someone will be me.

Although one of of the more interesting & layered treatments of nerds, the book falls short of its promise. It can't quite decide whether it wants to be a memoir or a cultural genealogy of nerds. In the end, it offers too little of both & left me wanting to read more. Definitely worth reading & a breezy read.

American Nerd, the Story of My People"; Benjamin Nugent's look into the subculture of nerdism, is a mix of facts and memoir. He looks back at his childhood, spent with similar boys, all finding fantasy games, books and computers easier to face than their peers. The safety found within orderly game rules, programming and building their own worlds protected them from the scorn and insults of their classmates and the worry and well-intentioned help of adults. Their banding together and imaginations eased lives touched by divorce, abuse, economic scarcity, and helped them navigate the treacherous waters of adolescence. Looking back at his childhood and teen years he also has to come to terms with the way he moved away from these friends, sometimes without explanation.

At times the text seems to push too hard when trying to establish the scholarship of the "nerd as subculture" idea. It is interesting to see the idea of grouping intellectual and physical outsiders existed far before the term came into vogue. There are examples in popular culture: Revenge of the Nerds, The 40 Year Old Virgin and Dungeons and Dragons and Halo. Being branded a nerd does not doom one to social outer darkness. The new world of Internet gaming provides a social gathering place for "nerds"(I immediately plan to cut my World of Warcraft hours). Sword fighting by the Society of Creative Anachronism and like activities helps to dispel part of the myths that nerds are physically frail and doomed to social exile. The business world actively courts those with computer savvy and ability to think outside the box. A great book for the nerd and anti-nerd alike(aren't we each a bit of both?).

The book is entertaining and informative, but has some glaring omissions. First, as Hilary "silverfoil" already mentioned, Nugent gives far too little mention to female nerd. (Did he not know enough of them?) Second, there is absolutely no mention of "athletic nerd" -- and yes, such creature exists and is not all that rare.

To quote "Care and Feeding of Hacker" (and the fact that I know of this document is proof of my nerdiness right there!):

"Many (perhaps even most) hackers don't follow or do sports at all and are determinedly anti-physical. Among those who do, interest in spectator sports is low to non-existent; sports are something one *does*, not something one watches on TV.

Further, hackers avoid most team sports like the plague. Volleyball was long a notable exception, perhaps because it's non-contact and relatively friendly; Ultimate Frisbee has become quite popular for similar reasons. Hacker sports are almost always primarily self-competitive ones involving concentration, stamina, and micromotor skills: martial arts, bicycling, auto racing, kite flying, hiking, rock climbing, aviation, target-shooting, sailing, caving, juggling, skiing, skating (ice and roller). Hackers' delight in techno-toys also tends to draw them towards hobbies with nifty complicated equipment that they can tinker with."

Replace "hacker" with "nerd" (the former is a subset of latter, anyway), and the quote holds true. I am a "scuba nerd", among other things -- I may have highly specialized interests to the exclusion of much else, but no one would call me an "effeet stick-figure". Scuba is also an activity that enables me to socialize with supposedly non-nerds, but are they really? So many scuba divers I know seem to be like me -- obssessed with technical details of the sport, rarely talking about anything else, and working in computer/engineering fields, that I suspect scuba is actually the ultimate nerd activity -- your LIFE depends on maintaining and correctly using technology and you build up your body for highly specific goals (almost like tuning a machine), yet there is no confrontation, and unless you act stupid (like a testosteron-addled jock?), your challenges are never greater than what you want them to be. How cool is that?

Finally, I think Nugent overestimates the amount of self-loathing among nerds and Aspies. Self-loathing and/or feeling of alienation certainly exists, and I experienced my share of it, but it seems to me that nowadays a lot of young women had realized that engineering major with glasses is liable to make a lot more money than the jock on the football team, and seem more tolerant of his social failings -- perhaps because these women themselves grew up on IM and texting? And as I know from personal experience, engineering majors want some *minimal* acceptance but do not feel the need for popularity. Getting laid regularly is enough to be content, and for self-loathing to disappear.

I'm a 53-year-old grandmother with impeccable Nerd credentials, and I looked forward to this book.

Having finished it, I'm baffled.

Why, when the subdeck proclaims "The Story of My People", does the author spend the final chapter making it ULTRA-clear that he hasn't numbered among us since the age of 14? At that time, he asserts, he became "cool".

Okay, I get it. Coming out as a nerd could be hazardous to your self-esteem, career prospects and continued marketability as a media hipster ... but I really resented the last-chapter renunciation.

Turning to the book, it's an enjoyable read, if a bit constrained by the writer's place in time. Oh, yes, he covers D&D ... but what about the 60's precursors, wargames? The treatment of the place of science fiction is truncated to 80's-kid sensibility; the author obviously missed those of us baby boomers who came to self-awareness as 60's-era library kids, scarfing up Asimov and Heinlein's YA titles (over the strenuous objections of school librarians, teachers and parents).

Bottom line: the book is interesting but too restricted to one writer's sensibility. Reach a bit, and you may touch the core of nerdness, but not in the limited cultural icons this author parades.

Are you a nerd? I am. And as an author, I don't have any puerile need to distance myself from the title.

Too bad this writer can't OWN the "people" he claims to document.

Is "hip" really worth your soul, honey?

I found this book truly intriguing. The bits about the rave culture were a little off, and in the cases of his ecstasy coverage, very far off, but in general, it hits very close to the mark. I and many others that I associate with touch on the Technoshamanic view of the world. Rushkoff does an exceedingly good job demonstrating the relationships between psychadelics and innovation in areas like silicon valley and chaos theory mathematics. Read for yourself, judge for yourself.

Under the guise of being a "theory" and "lifestyle" view of the communities arising around cyberspace, this book bats around the usual suspects - chaos theory, new cultures, modern life - and then degrades into a comparison between computer use and drugs. I will not deny the role drugs, specifically marijuana and LSD, have in computers, but to claim cyberspace requires much talk about drugs because it is a similar experience (seeing pretty images and designs in front of your face, even if they're not "there" in real life) is a bit of a stretch. Because the author spends his time discussing drugs, hippies, alternative lifestyles and other tangentially-related dreck, he fails to honestly explore hacker culture or even those who are advancing the concepts of cyberspace as something other than a consensual hallucination. I wouldn't recommend this to anyone except a researcher, as with the exception of a few pop quotes from famous computer and drug users, it's contentless and a moderately tedious read.

Rushkoff takes the reader on an elegant tour de force of the vast realm called "cyberia." With an uncanny ability to infuse humor and insights into his subject matter, he never lets the reader down.

The pulse of his books is reminiscent of the feeling you get at clubs when things are happening at a fast clip and a heated beat. The intelligence and forward-thinking Rushkoff offer make him unique and well worth the read.

Bravo!

I read lots of these books. I have read most of Neal Stephenson's, Bruce Sterling's, and William Gibson's novels. This is a good book if you have interests in this area. The people who gave bad reviews are just not smart enough to understand the book's content, if they even finished reading it.

In 1994, Doug Rushkoff set out to write an embedded, analytic travelogue linking a series of countercultural trends dealing with emerging networks and internet technologies. Instead of conducting technopunditry from the sidelines, Rushkoff got into the fray and followed around ravers, hackers,performance artists and writers whose philosophies emerged around a new surge of technoutopianism; linked inextricably with paganism, spirituality, and Eastern Philosphy. His aproach echoes the Tom Wolfe school subjective reporting, learning the lexicon of the object of study, trying to speak the language and reveal something about its psychology. What results is some snappy, breakneck prose colored philosophically and poetically by chaos mathematics and cyberpunk literature. This makes this book eminently fun, readable, and exciting. It also makes much of its proposed social and political uses for technology widely inaccurate. In a way, ten years removed, Cyberia should be appreciated now more than ever. We know better. And all of the wide-eyed fantasizing about decentralized spirituality and some wonderful fin de siecle millenial rapture spurned on by virtual reality are no longer dangerous or deluding, they can be seen in context, as thought waves that are spilled out of more optimistic time periods with exponential technological growth. The connect the dots game that Rushkoff plays is pretty astute, as well: the hippy connection, the second wave optimism that the 90s proposed to reconcile the "defeat" of the 60s, the fulmination of rave culture around these ideas that arrived in Berkely. A good book to read this book against would be Escape Velocity by Mark Dery, which is a little more "down to Earth", covers some similar material, and contains a counterpoint to Cyberia. Rushkoff himself has distanced himself widely from the rhetoric used in this book, but even this does not discredit this as a seminal text when looking at the viewpoints of subcultures built around technology.

Not nearly as memorable as the surrealist pornography of "The Story of an Eye," nor as thought-provoking as his study of the tangling of the great death and the "little death" of orgasm in his sex-and-mortality, violence-and-the sacred exploration "Erotism," this slim novel, as the author's uncomfortable tone betrays in its afterword, appears half-finished and abandoned rather than meant as it is for publication.

Lazare's fanatical devotion to the Left and especially Dirty's penchant for decadent and unsanitary lifestyle choices remain the most powerfully characterized moments, but too much of the novel remains as jittery and haphazard-- albeit Bataille argues in the afterword he meant it to be read as such-- as comparatively mundane next to the strong opening vignette of Troppmann and Dirty in one of literature's most effectively rendered dives, even by Parisian standards.

As one who has read plenty of Céline, a bit of Sade, and some of Sartre's fiction, this novel held some interest. Yet, it seems too slack, too dragged down by ennui. Far less erotic than a reader of "The Story of An Eye" might expect, this instead recalls Bataille's protege, Pierre Klossowski (his novels have been reviewed by me on Amazon; he's the brother of the painter Balthus) and his philosophical protagonists who also are prone more to shuffling about rather than coupling energetically. The extravagant claims left by readers here appear unfounded, given the turgid pace of its pages and the uneven tone of the narrative.

I don't understand why this book is considered to be one of Bataille's bastard children. It's beautifully written. The man was capable of working miracles with words through his style and arrangement of them. Blue of Noon is definitely not an exception.

Bataille's style is always one of brutal elegance. He's like a lover who slaps you in the face, only to pull you into a gentle embrace a moment later.

The main character, Troppman, is the star here - he is a deviant trying is best not to be. Ahhhh, the internal struggles - do you stay married and live your life as a respectable, productive member of society. Or do you run off with whores and derelicts to indulge the savage needs you've so long supressed.

Not to be outdone, his brightest co-star, is a woman named Dirty. She is a beautiful creation. She is a train wreck of a woman. She and Troppman braid themselves together in clearly conspicuous codependence of the worst sort, bawdy drunkeness paving the pathways to irrevocable damnation.

I also enjoyed Lazare; a woman Troppman finds himself thoroughly disgusted with, she has no redeeming features. Yet, he cannot stay away.

If you are a fan of the madman Bataille, don't miss out on this one. I think this is truly some of his best work.

"Blue of Noon" is the story of Henri, an amoral man living in Europe during the 1930s. He is supposedly married, but spends his time with similarly amoral women, lacking clothing, inhibition, shame, and even proper hygeine at times. He zips between London, Paris, Barcelona, and Frankfurt, and frankly, engages in nothing but immoral self-satisfying activities in every spot.

At various times, he agonizes over his relationships with his wife, his sexual partners, and his deceased mother. He becomes embroiled in a Communist revolutionary plot in Barcelona, with one of his sexual partners, a Jewish woman, involved in its planning and execution. He reveals his necrophilic obsession to two of his partners, further revealing the exact, even more sickening, subject of his obsession to one of them. He has sex, he gets sick, his women have sex, they get sick, everybody has sex, everybody gets sick. For the punchline, near the end of the novel, Bataille throws Nazis into the picture, showing us that all the depravity of fascism is comparable to the depravity he has shown us all along. Though published in 1957, the book was originally written in 1936.

This reviewer isn't buying it. Not a word of it. Not the story, not even the "1936" part. For one thing, the writing style is actually more mature than that of "L'Abbe C", published in 1950. Bataille is most probably trying to show off that he detected the evil inherent in the Nazis "way back when". I don't give him that much credit.

For another thing, I think he uses Nazis as an easy way to score "scary" points. One might intellectualize his choice by saying Bataille is trying to tell us that no matter how disgusting humans may act, at least we're not as bad as Nazis. Imagine a murderer begging leniency because he's not a Nazi. He's still a murderer. It seems Bataille is using Nazis to justify the pornography he just wrote, as if the world is such a horrible place that pornography is just another little bit of it, and tries to throw a philosophical wrench into the works, as if saying life is meaningless in the face of all the horrible things fascism is doing to us in Europe, but I suspect it was all done just for the hell of it. I frankly don't see any rhyme or reason to the thematic choices he makes.

I have nothing against the depravity or explicit nature of the book. "Been there, done that", right? It's not even all that explicit, there's probably less sex in this book than the average mainstream novel today, and he's certainly not advocating committing even the slightest harm to anyone. There are a few disturbing or distasteful ideas here and there, but one never gets the sense Bataille really means what he's writing. One gets the sense he's simply trying to come up with every juxtaposition of immoral behavior and social taboo he can, just to tweak the reader's moral compass a bit, trying to get a cheap rise out of his audience. Maybe this was an interesting exercise in 1957 (or "1936"), but given the state of depravity which existed in Germany during the 1920s, and the state of sexual liberation which swept Europe from the late 19th century through the early 20th century, I strongly doubt it.

Perhaps the target reader for this book will be the person interested in twisted versions of 19th-century literature (Bataille wrote like someone living 50 or 100 years before his time), or the works of De Sade (albeit in highly shortened format, this book being only 126 pages).

According to Georges Bataille's autobiographical note, LE BLEU DU CIEL ("The Blue of the Sky") was composed in the twilight before the occupation of Vichy France.

The descending night darkens these pages.

Dissolute journalist Henri Troppmann ("Too-Much-Man") and his lover, Dirty give way to every impulse, to every surfacing urge, no matter how vulgar. Careening from one sex-and-death spasm to the next, they deliver themselves over to infinite possibilities of debauchery. A fly drowning in a puddle of whitish fluid (or is it the thought of his mother, a woman he must not desire?) prompts Troppmann to plunge a fork into a woman's supple white thigh. The threat of Nazi terror incites a coupling in a boneyard.

Their only desire is to besmirch whatever is elevated, to vulgarize the holy, to pollute it, to corrupt it, to bring it down into the mud.

By muddying whatever is "sacred," they maintain the force of "the sacred."

As a historical document, BLEU DU CIEL is eminently interesting. It offers unforgettably vivid portraits of Colette Peignot (as Dirty) and the "red nun" Simone Weil (as Lazare).

It is also the story of a man who is fascinated with fascism and the phallus, of someone who loves war, although not for teleological reasons. It is the story of a man who celebrates war on its own terms, who nihilistically affirms its limitless power of destruction.

As the night materializes, the blue of the sky disappears.

Joseph Suglia, the author of YEARS OF RAGE

I don't understand why this book is considered to be one of Bataille's [illegitimate] children. It's beautifully written. The man was capable of working miracles with words through his style and arrangement of them. Blue of Noon is definitely not an exception.

Bataille's style is always one of brutal elegance. He's like a lover who slaps you in the face, only to pull you into a gentle embrace a moment later.

The main character, Troppman, is the star here - he is a deviant trying is best not to be. Ahhhh, the internal struggles - do you stay married and live your life as a respectable, productive member of society. Or do you run off with [prostitutes] and derelicts to indulge the savage needs you've so long supressed.

Not to be outdone, his brightest co-star, is a woman named Dirty. She is a beautiful creation. She is a train wreck of a woman. She and Troppman braid themselves together in clearly conspicuous codependence of the worst sort, bawdy drunkeness paving the pathways to irrevocable damnation.

I also enjoyed Lazare; a woman Troppman finds himself thoroughly disgusted with, she has no redeeming features. Yet, he cannot stay away.

If you are a fan of the madman Bataille, don't miss out on this one. I think this is truly some of his best work.

Good book for those in cultural studies, or someone curious about this subculture.

While this book is heavy on history, it also reads like a college textbook into the history, culture, health and psychological aspect of the gay men who identify as "bears".

Some of the chapters dragged, especially the ones dealing with the early 90's and the chat rooms and drama...but the ones that touched me were the personal coming out stories, and the men coming to terms with their bodies and attitudes in conservative America. Definatly a book that will stay on my shelf for many years to come.

Oh, more of the pseudo-intellectual self serving nonsense from Les Wright. Save your money and spend it on a good razor and some shaving cream. Grow up Les!

Sure it gives you history and such, but it tends to be a dry read. If you need a "deeper understanding" of what you like and why, read it. If you are satisfied knowing what you like, then spend your money some place else.

While it's commendable that someone would try to write a book that attempts to examine the history of the bear "movement" and try to figure out what it's all about, this book is simply terrible. The "research" is not even of high school quality; for example, the article that attempts to show that bears sprung up in the United States first by tracking the dates that the Resources for Bears page was first accessed in each country -- totally laughable and unacceptable to any serious social scientist.

The portions on the history of bears are mostly San Francisco scene name-dropping, and there's no serious attempt to examine the origin of the bear "movement" by taking a look at its roots in the leather community or in Girth and Mirth. Instead, we're told that bears came about because HIV-positive San Francisco men looked at extra weight as a sign of health in the mid-to-late eighties. No proof, just assertions.

Do yourself a favour and skip this book. You can spend your money better elsewhere.

This interesting book comes from an era that is now far gone. As a child, just after WWII, I saw men with, primarily, service tattoos and wanted one. It was carefully explained to me that "nice men" did not get tattooed and that the service tattoos weren't truly tattoos but the equivalent of service stripes. As a six year old child I found this confusing.

What Dr. Steward has done is gathered impressions of what it was like to be a tattooist circa 1950 on to about 1970. His portraits of sleazy interior malls and the persons who frequented them are chillingly real as are the sad impressions of his clientele.

For me, still un-inked, the larger story here is the conversion from the groves of Academe to the existence of a journeyman tattoo artist. We have his intellectual observations, as well his intimate relationship with the Kinsey Institute,to provide not only a look at the deductive logic behind getting a tattoo, at least at a certain socio-economic level then, are revelatory but perhaps only to then.

The wide spread acceptance of tattooing today (the last statistic I read said over 35% of men today have one)make this interesting reading if not germane to lifestyles today. Yet it has substance and to those with a taste for not only tattooing but the sexual implications, this will confirm much of what may have been thought. Dr. Steward's open acknowledgment of his sexual preferences de-fuses any leering speculation as to what might really have been his motives.

Still, for those who want an atmospheric, well constructed picture of an era, this book will fill in your urge to return to the "greaser" age. And for those of us who wanted one, but were denied, perhaps liberate our minds to, now, go get what we wanted then. If I had the hair, give me a flat top with a D.A. And that knife piercing the bicep just below the pack of Camels rolled in the sleeve of my black T-shirt.

I met Sam Steward around 1983 when he was quite elderly and I wonder what his friends would have to say about these reviews. I think most of the reviews are kind to him and the only real negativity I see are those in which the authors came to the book expecting a strictly scholarly work. Sam Steward wasn't a researcher in the classic social science sense. He was an energetic scholar, but his greatest interest was in the creation of literature, not in sifting through haystacks of facts to find new scientific insights.

I read this book shortly after I met Sam. I was actually more familiar with him as a writer of gay erotica, but this book tells you more about the kind of man Sam was. He had deep curiosities about the underlying psychological motivations of people and that's really the area in which he spent most of his time. That curiosity it typical of people who enjoy writing and his look into this subculture, one could speculate, is like one the instances any writer takes in which they journey into an objective investigation, knowing they are mining information and insights that will later inform their true love, writing fiction.

There's no doubt Sam took this investigation seriously, but it was never his intention to apply the level or scientific rigor one would expect of someone of the status of Alfred Kinsey. What he did at Kinsey's request was to describe a world, a microcosm, that would give Kinsey enough information to determine if a larger and more serious study was warranted. There weren't focus groups walking into Sam's tattoo parlor responding to a call for papers. They were rough and alienated men, drunks with their defenses down, kids in rebellions, frustrated people acting out. It takes an entertaining personality to get these people to say what they say and Sam Steward, if anything, was a decidely entertaining man; a storyteller who could keep a roomful of people enthralled with his vivid, if not naughty, descriptions of the extremes in society that are right under our very noses; extremes most people cannot see.

I've thought about this book a many, many times; practically every time I see a tattoo. Getting inked has never appealed to me but Sam's understanding of it most certainly does appeal to me. Even two decades after reading it, some things I remember from it make me smile and laugh out loud. There's a kind of deep-seated validation of humanness here that I think will serve many who read this. This isn't a book for everyone, but one thing that can be said is that there's more to it than the average person knows. It's art that goes deeper than the skin.

Academics get tired too but most don't do a 180 turn and join subcultures that seem completely opposed to their previous community. Samuel Steward became a tattoo artist but kept his scholarly mind working as he did so upon the urging of Kinsey, yes, that Alfred Kinsey. The result many years later is this book. Part history, part personal recollection, and part social sciences, this is an interesting and easy to read book. If you don't except detailed interviews with people or rigorous research protocols you won't be disappointed. I think the first half of the book which focuses on what he observed is much better than the second more "historical" half. It could use photos and a better spine to hold the book together.

Having 4 tattoo's applied last year at the ripe young age of 50, I was fascinated by this book. Tattoo's in the 50's & 60's apparently were taboo except for the underbelly of life. Looking at how they are accepted today as opposed to then is astounding. The syndicate was even involved in the 50's. The book actually had me laughing out loud at some of the situations this highly educated man faced when he gave up teaching English at a major university and took up tattooing. If you have any interest in tattoo's be sure to purchas this one.

As a scholar of what might be called outsiders, I was eager to read this work on tatooing. But the scholarship here is hackneyed and unprofessional. His sources are scattered and incomplete and his discussion is of similar quality. Given the excellent quality of research being done on this topic, this book falls into a dont-bother-with category.

From the vantage point of those courageous enough to take on the philosophies and rigidities of established hierarchies, the year 1968 can be considered to be the best year ever in American history. The activists of both the counterculture and the civil rights movement showed an overabundance of guts during this time, and their rebellions and verbal confrontations resulted in enduring changes in American society. This is not to say that all of their motives were pure, and many no doubt joined protest movements out of some strange sense of group belonging. But we have them to thank for many of the changes that were eventually brought about, especially the end of the military draft and the end of the (criminal) Johnson administration.

This book gives a summary of those events from a time frame just two decades after they happened, and the author has given the reader a good narrative of the most important events. Readers who did not live during that time will thus obtain some insight into why people acted as they did in 1968, in spite of it being a boom year economically. The war in Vietnam of course took center stage in 1968, especially the Tet offensive and the resulting discouragement over the possibility of American "success" in Vietnam. The activists of 1968 did not end this war, that took another four years, but they laid the groundwork for future confrontations, the latter of which finally resulted in the American withdrawal from an illegal and immoral conflict.

Since it is a history book of sorts, the author wants to put 1968 in historical context, and so there are many interesting bits of information discovered in this book that were new to this reviewer. These facts need to be checked of course with further research, but some of these include:
1. Dean Acheson directed military aid to the French in Vietnam (tax dollar money that is).
2. Franklin Roosevelt Jr accused Humphrey of being a draft dodger in the 1960 Democratic campaign (under the suggestion of Robert Kennedy).
3. Robert Kennedy rejected De Gaulle's proposal for a reunited Vietnam.
4. Francis Cardinal Spellman called the Vietnam war "Christ's war" (the Catholic church of course had a predominant influence in South Vietnam).
5. The CIA provided financial support to organizations such as the National Students Association, the National Council of Churches, and the YWCA. The discovery of this by the public at the time may explain some of the extreme paranoia and conspiracy notions that are floated about presently. But in this regard the author also asks the reader to consider the following statement that was popular in 1968: "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not after you."
6. Not only the CIA, but also Army Intelligence spied on civil rights activists.
7. Mayor Daley had his own national spying operations that infiltrated antiwar organizations in cities such a San Francisco, Oakland, and Los Angeles (Chicago taxpayers of course footed the bill for Daley's shenanigans).

One interesting bit of commentary in the book regards the author's characterization of the "herd instinct" in Washington. This is the penchant for those who get behind a president to engage in unquestioned, uncritical loyalty to his actions and pronouncements. Once committed to a president they get behind him with full force, and do not tolerate any dissent. The author correctly refers to this as "ignorance masquerading as insight." The "herd instinct" phenomenon can be found today in the excess of veneration paid to the current president, in spite of the many errors and missteps this president has taken since first taking office in 2001.

The economic and political hierarchies at the present time are just as corrupt and dysfunctional as they were in 1968. The occupants of these hierarchies are just as smug now as then (or perhaps even more so), and they fancy themselves as possessing a special sort of insight into world events. Their mental confabulation would be laughable at times, if it were not so pathetic. But the rebels, commentators, and activists of 1968 gave us good hints on how to deal with these hierarchies: with our heads cocked back, we should at first coat them with a thick layer of saliva, reject their reward systems, and expose the intellectually-stymied sycophants that spread their propaganda. And like the hierarchies of 1968, their extreme fragility will cause them to collapse under the strong gravity of counter-criticism and counterculture.

I finished this book fairly quickly, and I came away from it feeling like I had a decent overview of the atmosphere in America during 1968, but that I had not learned anything other than the basic facts of what went on. In my opinion, Kaiser fails to go in-depth enough into any one subject (except the McCarthy campaign) to give the reader a true understanding of what it must have felt like to be there. I was born in 1982, so I was not there, and I still feel like I lack an understanding of the attitudes and events of the time. Also, I agree with the other reviewer that the title is misleading. This book is not about music or the counterculture or really even the shaping of a generation. It is about the presedential campiagn of 1968, and specifically the McCarthy campaign. If someone wanted a more of a cultural account that is specific and goes in depth into the feelings and conflicting spirits that characterized that turbulent year, I would recommend they look elsewhere, as I will.

Charles Kaiser's "1968 In America" is going to be a big disappointment to those who bought it thinking that they would learn a great deal about the culture and music of the sixties. Only one chapter of the book looks at the music and counterculture of the sixties in any detail, and the other chapters only briefly mention them. Anyone who wants to learn more about sixties music and the counterculture should look elsewhere. But if you're a political buff like me then this book should be a delight. The great majority of this book is taken up with describing the bitter fight for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination in 1968. It was a fight that came down to four men: President Lyndon Johnson, whose policies in Vietnam had turned many Americans against him(especially the young), but who still had the support of the old-fashioned big-city mayors who used to run the Democratic Party, but whose influence even in 1968 was declining. Waiting in the wings if Johnson withdrew was his talkative Vice-President, Hubert Humphrey. But the real focus of the book is on Eugene McCarthy, the eloquent, intellectual, but also enigmatic and curiously passive Senator from Minnesota. Many people disliked McCarthy and considered him to be a snob and too "lazy" to be President, but as Kaiser demonstrates it was McCarthy who had the guts to join the antiwar movement and oppose Johnson when most of the "experts" thought it was political suicide. McCarthy's gamble paid off when he nearly defeated Johnson in New Hampshire, giving the President a death blow which led to his sudden withdrawal from the campaign a couple of months later. However, McCarthy's surprise showing led Bobby Kennedy, the "Prince-in-Waiting" to enter the race. This triggered a bitter, no-holds-barred war of words and emotions between McCarthy and Kennedy and their supporters. In the end this fight became so nasty that it would probably have prevented either man from beating Vice-President Humphrey at the Democratic Convention. But then Kennedy's murder in Los Angeles in June 1968 following his narrow victory over McCarthy in the California primary changed the race all over again, and gave, Kaiser argues, McCarthy one last chance to win the nomination. Typically, McCarthy procrastinated and quoted poetry while Humphrey wooed the delegates he needed to win. The book loses much of its passion after that, and Kaiser's description of the fall campaign between Humphrey and his Republican opponent, Richard Nixon, isn't nearly as interesting as his descriptions of the McCarthy-Kennedy feud. In short, if you like politics you'll love this book, and if you don't - well, then don't buy it.

This book gives a great outline of 1968-- specifically the antiwar movement at Columbia University starting on April 23, 1968. This was my primary reason for buying the book, and for this, it was well worth it. A lot of ground is covered in the book, and I found all of it intresting-- the Vietnam war (Tet Offensive), history of music, LBJ... 1968 In America will prove very enjoyable to anyone who finds great intrest in the history of the 60's! Note: the book is told from the perspective of a liberal jew, so if you're looking for pure chronicling of the year, it's not what you're gonna get.

Does a good job of presenting the outlook of a white, Jewish, liberal college student living in New York in 1968. There is nothing wrong with that in itself but Kaiser's frame of refernce and the material he choses covers are hardly large enough to warrant "The Shaping of a Genertion" claim in the title. "1968 on The Upper West Side: Music, Democratic Politics and the Shaping of Charles Kaiser" would seem a more apt title.

Despite this narrow focus, what Kaiser does cover is written about in an adequate, if somewhat bland, journalistic style.

This book is about identity and the various Harley sub-cultures. It has little to say about metric cruisers, sport-tourers, or any other type of motorcycling.

It is not a textbook. It is for riders or wanna-be riders. It is for fun, for personal enjoyment.

And I did enjoy the book. It helped me learn that I should not waste money on a Harley when I replace my metric cruiser. Apparently I belong with the sport touring folks who wear high-visibility protective gear and top-of-the-line full face helmets by choice, not law.

I enjoyed the book, although the author's opinion of helmet comfort is misinformed and probably based on ill-fitting headgear.

I know I don't want to be part of the culture she describes, but I recommend the book. I disagree with her on many points, but I recommend this book. It's really a treat to read.

Don't be fooled by the title of this dull book. It offers neither "lust" nor insight into what is a very interesting subject---women Harley riders. We may speculate about why someone would write such a book, possibly to exercize the author's ego or to fullfill some requirment to "publish or perish". But why would anyone read this one?

I bought the book with high hopes because I'm interested in the subject: women who ride big motorcycles. The book is really a cheap exploitation of people's interest in a "trendy" subject. The only real insights are those the author quotes from other books on the subject. The endless interviews with members of Harley-Davidson clubs are tedious and cover no new ground. Most strange is the author's glib treatment of the racism and antisemitism of some riders, as displayed by wearing of swastikas and making racist comments. Her analysis only goes so deep as to state that since most of "working class" white America is racist, why shouldn't Harley riders be? This is both an insult to working class Americans as well as to the reader's intelligence. I hope that this kind of crude apologism for racism is not widespread in anthropology, the discipline in which the author has her degree. Given the shallow analysis in the book, the author's gimmicky claim to be a rider herself is suspect and I wondered after reading it if she got most of her information from biker magazines.

BIKE LUST is a unique, forceful and informative ethnography in which Barbara Joans takes the reader inside the minds and hearts of an emergent, important and incompletely understood American subculture. She tells much of this story in the language and with the forcefulness of a cultural insider.
I know of no account of Harley culture like it. The examples are clear and cleanly and drawn, not only in the manner of a professional anthropologist but also as a storyteller with a sharp ear for language.
Joans comes to the task with particularly apt credentials, and the originality of her technique illuminates the character of the group she represents. An accomplished anthropologist with an established reputation in the field, Joans
has not written simply an anthropologist's monograph, but by adopting the voice of her study population, she brings the reader inside the community; she makes the events and the people come alive. This combining professional precision with subcultural patoise, enhances the portrayal. You find yourself seeing through biker's eyes, hearing and absorbing biker terminology and world view, and feeling the clamminess of water-soaked clothing after a stormy night's ride.
Because of Joans' highly accessible style, often invisible prose, and the intrinsic interest of the material, the work will have broad appeal. "Bike Lust" should find extensive readership among the general public because of its readability,
and because of the adventures it recounts. A significant part of Joans' contribution to this literature is her use of both masculine and feminine perspectives in equally engaging ways. For this reason it might be argued that Joans' work is the first effectively ethnographic study of this subculture.

This was an informative and enjoyable book, especially for the targeted audience. As an earlier reviewer wrote, it is not a scholarly treatise with data, so if you're an academic looking for such, you'll be disappointed. But for the motorcyclist and passenger, especially the Harley owner, it's a good read. Basically, the female author offers her opinions on Harley owners and passengers, based on her fairly recent involvement in the lifestyle. She categorizes and describes both male and female enthusiasts. Being female, and since females constitute most of the passengers and are such statistical outliers as riders, the author spends most of her time on female related issues. Her anecdotes, and those of the females she interviewed, of their riding experiences are both informative and entertaining. As a fairly recent Harley owner, I really benefitted from her insights, and I recommend the book to all my riding friends, especially the females.

...this shouldn't be it. As a woman, I agree that someone ought to write a book about this subject, but Joans hasn't done it justice. She admits speaking with only one "Biker Chick" (author's caps) and nevertheless produces a whole slew of generalizations--based on what? Observation without interview doesn't make anthropology. Many premises are established (shakily) and then contradicted only pages later. Apparently she "interviewed" a bunch of her friends, threw together some poorly supported conclusions and wound up with this book. The scholarship is too poor to make it an academic work, and there aren't enough good stories to make it a general interest work. Save your money, or read The Perfect Vehicle instead.

This book is shallow and pretentious, the literary equivalent of a wine-and-cheese eater at a Soho gallery who cares more about being seen with the art crowd than exploring art. Caveney is the wine sipper, Burroughs the unfortunate artwork buried beneath Caveney's oh-so avant garde style. Rather than providing insight or information about his fascinating subject, Caveney pastes together a collage of hackneyed Burroughs images, and a few airy snippets of idolatrous prose. I got more pleasure from imagining how exciting a decent biography of Burroughs would be, than from reading this awful book.

An excellent introduction to the life and work of American artist William Burroughs, it's especially notable for the beautiful design which incorporates snapshots, artifacts such as hat-cleaning receipts and Army reports, and washes of Burroughs' shotgun paintings which background each textured-paper page. This substantial hardback is reminiscent of Burroughs' own scrapbooks and penchant for the pastiche, its look and feel mimicking the experiments in randomness-- cut-ups and ballistics-- which (in)formed so much of his work. It is foremost a visual, tactile, and olfactory (new it smells like crayons) treat. The New York Times called this "an empty book," which is reason enough to love it. It's a pop biography, a primer on the grand-daddy of the beats. It's not deep, but as eye candy it's neat.

Caveney's Gentleman Junkie, published in the United Kingdom under the title The Priest They Called Him, is the MTV Video of the Burroughs biographies.

The layout of the book is visually stunning, often placing images of Burroughs' paintings, Burroughs himself, Burroughs' friends, or collages of his work underneath, behind, along with, or beside the text. If you've read the Barry Miles biography of Burroughs, or Literary Outlaw by Ted Morgan, there is nothing here in the pre-1980 material that you haven't read already.

The chief virtue of Gentleman Junkie is the remarkable layout, which makes the book an artwork unto itself. The secondary virtue lies in the fact that it was published in 1998, many years after the Morgan and Miles biographies, and thus includes some info on an era those works missed. A list of Burroughs' works is appended, as is a skeletal index.

While this book is interesting to look at, I would recommend Ted Morgan's book LITERARY OUTLAW as a better biography of Burroughs.

ken32

The only reason I read this book was because it was in Amazon's under $5 bargain bin. The fact that it is on sale should have been a red flag that it is not that good...

However, this book makes a very nice coaster. It prevents my beautiful furniture from getting water stains from the beverages I set on it. This book is less then $5...

Would it really hurt you that much to buy it??

This book is excellent. This book not only provides an insight into the world of W.S. Burroughs, but also brief insight into the lives of such figures as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. There are picturs throughout, and numerous quotes from Burroughs to spark the imagination, and promote new mental growth. This biography spans the time from his birth to his death, and to my knowledge is the most accurate and complete biography published so far about this dynamic literary figure. If you wish to learn more about this author, or about the beat world in general, this book will provide a world of answers.

I bought BENEATH THE DIAMOND SKY with the expectation that it would be a history of the Haight-Ashbury district in San Francisco from 1965 to 1970, as the title implies. But upon reading it, I discovered that it's really a history of the ROCK MUSIC of that time and place. I know that rock music is a very important part of Haight-Ashbury in the '60s, but Hoskyns mostly ignores other aspects. The book's title should definitely have been different. There are some other subjects dealt with occasionally; for instance, there is a helpful discussion of the differences between the counterculture of Haight-Ashbury and the politically activist counterculture as exemplified by Berkeley.

So, if you're looking for a rock music history, this book is interesting, and the photos are great, with every other page being a nearly full-page photo. I like the funky page colors too. I don't know enough of the subject to say if every detail is accurate, though in my opinion the book should have either footnotes or better end notes. (On page 219 Hoskyns sites a study of protest rock in the late '60s that concluded that it may have made people more passive, but he doesn't say what study he's referring to!! That kind of thing is rare, thankfully.) It also would have been helpful if the book included some lists, such as one of the most important recordings to come out of San Francisco in the late '60s. Still, BENEATH THE DIAMOND SKY is an enjoyable read, and I learned a substantial amount about the music of that era.

If you are like me, the subject matter of Beneath the Diamond Sky will be quite familiar turf: Haight-Ashbury in the sixties. In this case familiarity does not breed contempt. It breeds Love (as in "Summer of"). This bygone pop culture big bang has never been more concisely or attractively typified as in this book.

I fell in love with this book at first sight. I held it in my hands and yea, it was beautiful. I paged through it's rainbow-hued, lavishly illustrated pages and was filled with Satisfaction. I read the text and it was Righteous, dude. I admired the posters and buttons, rare photos and it was all very far out. This is a very reassuring book, a chronicle of the time when the universe swirled psychodynamically around Haight-Ashbury. It betokens all things Hippie and San Francisco without being sugar-coated.

Previous books addressing this topic have not found the right mix of form and content. "Summer of Love" by Joel Selvin, for instance was a pop history document which lacked the design and illustrative qualities of this book. Also, Selvin tended to rewrite things to the chagrin of the psychedelic cognoscenti enough to bring doubt upon the enterprise. "Diamond Sky" tends to neglect revisionism in favor of what is actually known.

Hoskyns does an admirable job of running all of the characters across the page for our scrutiny. The quotes, the deeds, the legends are all covered. I can't quibble with any of it, it's there and its familiar and as I stated before, it is beautifully presented. Hello to Jerry, Janis, Skip, Grace, Chet et. al.

Barney Hoskyns is a very adept pop music writer whose work appears quite often in 'serious pop music' magazines like Mojo. What I like about him here is that he doesn't seem to intrude upon the luminous subject matter at all. He lets the Haight speak for itself, which it continues to do quite well.

I am quite pleased I ordered a used copy of this book, and would have been quite disappointed if I had paid the [money on the] price tag.. Nice photos and much ado about music. In short, I lived in the Haight-Ashbury during those wonderful years. And this book reflects nothing of what life was really like. At all, to us that were not directly tied to a band. I partied at ...Ashbury and other places. I had hopes this would address what street life was truly like back then. It does not.

...Great photos and much ado about music. In short, I lived in the Haight-Ashbury during those wonderful years. And this book reflects nothing of what life was really like. At all, to us that were not directly tied to a band. I partied at 710 Ashbury and other places. I had hopes this would address what street life was truly like back then. It does not.

This nicely illustrated musical history explains how the "psychedelic" sound of mid- to late- 60's San Francisco bands (e.g., the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Janis Joplin, Country Joe and the Fish, Moby Grape, and others) were an extension of folk music with roots in 1950's beat culture. Thus, Kesey, Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burrows figure prominently in the book, giving the music its foundation, it's apolitical ethos, and (as Hoskyns repeatedly emphasize) its acid and other drugs. The author's most fascinating and best writing occurs when he explores the roots and evolution of the San Francisco sound, and its love/hate relationship with the subcultures in which it was embedded.. For example, his analysis of the tension between the Berkeley radicals and the hippies is surprisingly astute and well documented (especially since there is inadequate analysis in much of the book).

The end of the psychedelic scene is a familiar and shallow account that includes legions of teen runaways, rampant drugs and violence, and, (must we hear this again?) the conveniently symbolic disaster at Altamount. More instructive is his description of how the music industry co-opted the scene (with help from musicians who actually wanted to make money!), the organizational talent of promoter Bill Graham who competed with the established but looser "Family Dog" outfit, the overdoses, and the dissolution of the beat-inspired ethos. Hoskyns writes that some of this was dissolution was inevitable, as the once young hippie musicians became the establishment, and a new generation rebelled against it. However, while San Francisco was a major part of the 60's scene, it was not the only part, and Hoskyns doesn't place it within the national context of the Nixon presidency, the increasing military/police complex, and the growing politicalization and militancy of women and other disenfranchised groups.

More importantly, for a music history Hoskyns' musical analysis is fairly weak, you don't get an idea of what the music was like, nor is there much discussion of how the groups differed. But that would have required a more serious, even scholarly book. "Beneath the Diamond Sky" is meant to appear a bit trippy, with different fonts and font SIZES and various tie-dye colors thrown in to replicate the feeling of the period. This mostly doesn't work; it's too much artifice, but at least you get some feeling for the creative impulse of the time. Finally, the book would have been better with a epilogue tracing what more of what happened to the S.F. musical and cultural leaders after the 60's ended, and what their influence has been on others.

However, that's not really what this book is about (despite its excellent early cultural analysis). The book is best for its great photographs of these seminal musicians and cultural icons in their prime, including pictures of street scenes, posters, and free concerts at Golden Gate park Still, the book can be annoying because of typos and other mistakes, and seemingly contradictory statements. It appears there was no single Haight Ashbury scene, and that's why this book may offend some who were actually there. However, I can strongly recommend this for its photos, and as an introduction to the subject (especially if you can find it used or discounted}. A short bibliography--but no discography!--may encourage further research into "Hashbury" history. Note: The book title is taken from Bob Dylan's "Mr. Tangerine Man."

This is both an informative and interesting book. From the outset, readers should be aware that it was written a lot more like a sociological study and than an expose or a fanzine.

Although the book is a dense read, it is packed with insight and thought-provoking analysis. It's a welcome addition to the library of any serious sociology student or researcher with an interest in subcultures. At the same time, it contains a great deal of information that would be fascinating to fans of death metal music, and is a must-read for those with a real interest in the genre.

being a die-hard fan of the Death Metal genre, I already knew 95% of everything that was already written in this book. what i found most educational about the book is the history of death metal, which was the only thing i didn't know. Natalie Purcell goes into detail on why death metal fans are attracted to this type of music, why we create this type of music, why the lyrics are so negative, ect. anyone that does not respect or understand death metal should read this book in order to gain a better understanding of why we do what we do.

Death Metal Music is valuable for its history of death metal, as it knowledgeably jumps from band to band and provides helpful descriptions that will likely lead readers to discover new bands. However, in Chapter 3 (pp. 39-49), which describes the lyrics of death metal, the author makes some surprising mistakes that soil her credibility and call into question how accurate her findings might be.

The biggest problem occurs during her discussion of the social messages in death metal. She writes, "Anti-abortion messages may be found in songs like `Altering the Future'" (48). I have seen this mistake made before, but anyone who has heard this song by the band Death knows that the lyrics are not anti-abortion, but in fact pro-choice. The first verse describes the rotten life that follows for a baby born to a mother that is not capable of being a fit parent. The verse ends with this statement: "To exist in this world may be a mistake / The one who is with child, it's their choice to make." Clearly, Chuck Schuldiner is advocating a woman's right to choose. The second verse describes the necessity of capital punishment for murderers, but the chorus makes a clear distinction between abortion and murder. The chorus goes, "Abortion, when it is needed / Execution, for those who deserve it." The whole point of the song is that sometimes lives need to be ended to improve the future. To call it anti-abortion is to deny part of the legacy left behind by a death metal giant, and if any band should be well represented in this book, it is Death.

Chuck described his views on abortion in a 1995 interview as follows: "It should be legal. If I was a woman surely I would like to have a choice to have a child or not. In [the] U.S. [a] lot of new-borns are killed because they were unwanted. It is better to solve it immediately when a woman finds out about the pregnancy and she doesn't want a child. Better to go for an abortion than to kill a baby. That is terrible. Men cannot force women to keep a child when they themselves feel they can't." See http://www.emptywords.org/SparkMagazine07-95.htm for the whole interview.

Another statement suggests an ignorance of the metal bands that prefigured death metal. The author writes, "Mysticism and the occult accented the lyrics of major 1970s bands like Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Witchfynde, Iron Maiden, and others" (40). Iron Maiden? Iron Maiden was formed in 1977, yes, but did not release its first album until 1980, and even then its lyrics were dedicated to reality and to retelling classic stories; mysticism and the occult did not become part of Maiden's repertoire until a few years later in songs like "The Number of the Beast" and "Revelations." To group Maiden with Sabbath and Zeppelin, both of whom recorded their most important material in the early 70s, suggests a shaky understanding of metal history.

The author makes another glaring error concerning time, again on page 40. She brings up H. P. Lovecraft because his horror stories of chaotic gods and hoary magical secrets influence the lyrics of bands like Morbid Angel and Nile. Unfortunately, she refers to him as "a 19th century author" (40). Lovecraft was born in 1890, and though he wrote a couple stories as a child, the bulk of his writings came from the final ten years of his life (1927-1937), obviously making him a twentieth-century author.

These may seem like small points, but they are all easily documented facts that the author was simply too lazy or too careless to get right, all in the course of ten pages. How many other mistakes did she make? Can her scientific studies later in the book be trusted? I enjoyed the history she provides of death metal, but I'm not going to keep a book on my shelf when the author cannot summon the respect to correctly write about Death or Lovecraft.

I had initially expected this book to be your typical "history of ..." and, judging from the other reviews, I think many other people were expecting this as well. I'll warn you now: if you're looking for a book on the history of death metal, this is NOT the book to buy. However, if you want to delve into the world of death metal from a purely academic perspective, this is a pretty damn good place to start.
The book reads much like a thesis paper or a supplementary textbook, focusing on the socio-political aspects of the death metal subculture. The history provided is minimal at best (and contains a couple of errors, but nothing worth the abuse that suttercane202 laid on it), providing a very brief overview that is best targeted to those outside of the death metal scene. There are plenty of interviews, quotes, and references throughout the book, and the author uses them wisely, although I believe the book could have delved a little deeper into some elements. The only serious flaw I find in this book is that many statements are repeated throughout the book, taking space that would have been better occupied by additional, new material.
I have been an active member of the death metal scene since '86, and I don't really find anything new in this book, but it was still enjoyable to read.
Based on material alone, I could definitely see this book becoming a very useful addition to a socio-political course in a musical institution in the near future. And speaking as an avid death metal fan, I would like to see this book added to curriculum outside of music institutions so that outsiders can finally get an objective insight into the scene - maybe then they won't freak out so much when they see us walking down the street.

Hello, potential readers. I'm the author of this book, and I just wanted to write a little something to let you know what the book does and does not do, and what some of its strengths and weaknesses are.

While some critics have said the book reads like a grad school thesis or dissertation, this it was not. I actually wrote it while I was in college, but it was a labor of love that I produced on the side. Most of it was written when I was around 19-20 years old, though it took me a couple years to edit it and get it published.

I really do feel this is a unique look at the Death Metal subculture from an insider angle. I spent many years penetrating every part of the scene (shows, "metalfests", labels, zine-producers, touring bands, radio stations, etc.), and really became a member of it myself. I was surprised at how fully I was able to embrace and enjoy the music as well as all of the social aspects of the subculture. At the same time, I did plenty of research on what had already been published about metal heads, horror fans, and similar groups.

With that said, a lot of the research done for this book was very informal. Because nothing had really been published on death metal in particular (with the exception of some pretty unreliable sources), I relied to an unusual extent on "authorities" in the scene. I built a rough history of the scene through extensive interviews with death metal fans and musicians who lived through it. Quotes from these scene personalities and authorities are scattered throughout. These are not the most reliable sources, but they were definitely the best available. I feel confident that I ended up with a thorough and accurate sketch of the Death Metal scene.

(One of the readers who criticizes my book on this page points out what he feels are three small but worrisome errors. In one case, he interprets a lyric differently from me. In another case, he has found an editing error ["19th century author" should have read "19th century-style author"]. And in a third case, he justifiably worries that I grouped one band with a series of other bands from a different decade. In the larger paragraph, I was trying to illustrate the similarities in lyrical content among these bands, but I phrased this particular sentence in such a way that drew attention to the time period, and this was a mistake.)

For me the biggest failing in this book is the section where I report survey results. I do bring cursory attention to the fact that my sample of death metal fans wasn't selected in a scientific fashion that permits generalizing the results to all death metal fans. But at the same time, the way I write about this group throughout the section seems to ignore my own warning. In some ways, I wish I could go back and re-edit this, now that I know much more about conducting social-scientific research.

So what does my book offer? While it's a bit dense and too information-packed to be a quick easy read, it can serve as a good reference book for those with an interest in the history of the scene, especially the bands and albums that characterize different subgenres and eras of the scene. It also provides a nice broad sketch of scene dynamics and the ways in which this subculture has functioned and changed over time. But most fundamentally and most importantly, I do feel that the book really gives voice to the fans and musicians of death metal. It provides a strong a challenge to some stereotypes about metal heads and the music they love. Later chapters also discuss in detail the value and function of subcultures like the death metal scene, and the significance of the lyrical themes and pervasive dark imagery of metal. To me, these are the heart of the analysis.

So, in conclusion, I hope you'll find my book an interesting and worthwhile read. Because it was published by an academic press, the price tag is pretty steep. You might want to check it out at your local library to decide whether you're interested in owning it.

Thanks for taking the time to read this,
natalie