How can I review a book that has been stolen from me, not once, but TWICE. Now it's out of print! Help . . .I need a copy

This book is really an anthropological analysis of music in our culture, and how the documentation of music through recording has changed music's role. It also esxpresses the idea that recorded music (which Eisenberg calls "Phonography") is to live music as film is to theatre. Told from the perspective of someone who has equal admiration and recognition to Caruso, Mozart, Elvis Costello, Frank Zappa and Aristiotle, this music-philosophy book is remarkabl;y readable and quite profound. written before "sampling" of music was a popular artform. Really Great Stuff.

If you ever wanted to know if someone else really loves music and atributes their life blood to it, this is the book for you. Eisenfeld portrays the role music plays in several distinctly eccentric individuals' lives throughout the chapter, giving the reader not only a beautiful portrait of the characters, but of the universality of music as well.

This is an interesting book in many respecsts. It combines a vast amount of information without real evidence to connect the facts. In amny cases the book is simply not true. Eisenberg uses metaphors which are not true. For example he says that one species installed another in its gut for nutrition. It may have happened accidentally through evolution but I don't believe any creature installed another on purpose. Where is evolution. There are several examples of this sort.Eisenberg states that the human race dominates and that the bacteria(for example) have lost "market share" He should read Lewis Thomas "The Fragile Species" who makes a case (with data) that the human race is simply a small offshoot of a small branch of evolution and that the bacteria and other groups by sheer weight and numbers far outclass the human race and have survived far longer.

I read the whole book including the footnotes, the biological information was -to me- original and a number of ideas I found very plausible, tapping into my interest in symbiosis, why humans can't be separated from 'wilderness' and the interpretation of nature by other cultures. Some of it is hard going, the words Evans decorates his prose with requires a dictionary on hand...a large one and not just for scientific jargon. I found the mythology parts padded and overly convoluted but that is my bias, and the extrapolation of human interaction in future a weak point, though I really liked how Evan takes an idea -held belief, fleshes it out, then examines where this fail in practice or can not widely. Human population reduction was something I think he explored inadequatley, dismissing something which IMHO is inevitable.

I think every town planner and ecologist should read this book or at least browse a bookmarked group reference copy, the references alone are worth an institutional copy. Even if you don't agree with the ideas put forward, it will take your mind into some novel directions

I read with disbelief some of the reviews, because I thought this book a work of genius - one of the very few that bridge the gulf between a scientifc and an arts view of history. My impression is that one reviewer is a fundamentalist Christian and that the others are mostly narrow scientists unfamiliar with ideas about myth and metaphor. Each seems to slate the book because it is not written from the standpoint of the reviewer's specialist interest. My own problem with the book was the many Americanisms and analogies from baseball and other sports about which I am too narrow to be informed, but I am not willing to knock off even half a star for that. I have made it my top recommendation for students of human ecology.