The title of this book is way out of the strike zone. You see "Who Invented the Game?" and you think this volume is going to be about the origins of baseball, a scholarly little attempt to separate the true history of the sport from the myth of Abner Doubleday at Cooperstown (certainly one of the greatest public relations stunts in history with regards to promoting a small town in the middle of nowhere). However, this book, based on the PBS documentary by filmmaker Ken Burns, is really a condensed version of what I watch every year just before opening day. Not that there is anything wrong with that; the companion volume to the "Baseball" documentary is a weighty tome and an abbreviated version written for younger readers is certainly a good idea. But then the title of the book should be something else (this has struck a raw nerve with me; as a teacher I require students to have a thesis statement that they prove in the body of their essay, which sort of requires them to be about the same thing, and I have the exactly same feelings when it comes to title). "Who Invented the Game?" will answer such burning questions as "Who played the first real game?", "Who invented the curve ball?", and "Why is the pitcher's mound exactly 60 feet 6 inches from home plate?" But the book is not organized according to such topics, instead following the same structure as the documentary series. Illustrated with dozens of photographs this book by Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns with Paul Robert Walker might serve well to get youngsters who have not seen the entire documentary interested in checking it out. But for those who have watched all nine innings or read the companion volume, this is ground already well covered.

This is a lavish book. Great pictures and stories about the founding fathers of jazz, particularly Louis Armstorng and Duke Ellington and how they affected and were affected by historical events. This also gives a lot of insight about earlier jazz artists who are not as popular today but still important.

What bothers me the most about this book is that it seems to abruptly end at about 1955-1960. Admittedly jazz becomes harder to cover as styles branch out and diversify. However, I am a big Miles Davis fan and I was greatly disappointed by the coverage of Miles and artists of the last 50 years. A lot of sniping in the book from artists about other artists. I'm more interested in the stories behind the music.

That said, this is a great book about jazz up to 1955, but it runs into a brick wall and stops. This series is good in that it will get people interested in all type of jazz again but there is a lot more than what this book covers.

I loved this book; it's well-balanced and has plenty of cultural perspective. There were lots of anecdotes and photos that I have never seen before (the pictures of blacks dancing at an outdoor big band show at Randalls Island in 1938 are almost worth the price of the book alone). The main criticism about this book (and the Ken Burns Jazz series in general) is that it gives short shrift to jazz since the 1960s. First off, as Ken Burns has said himself, he's an historian, so this project will obviously focus more on the origins and development of the music rather than present-day musicians. And as much as today's jazz musicians and fans like to tell you otherwise, there haven't been too many groundbreaking developments in the music since the free jazz movement of late Coltrane and early Ornette Coleman, or the funk/rock excursions by Miles Davis. Furthermore, and more importantly, jazz is simply no longer a big part of the present-day American landscape. Although jazz records rarely sold as well as more pop-oriented music (a jazz record that sold 20,000 copies was considered a big hit), the music was always written about in mainstream publications and talked about by just about anyone. Heck, guys like Miles, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk and Coltrane were occasionally featured on prime-time television. Today, the biggest (and perhaps only) jazz star is Wynton Marsalis, a bland neo-traditionalist who hasn't forged any new ground himself. For myself, I'd rather read about Satchmo, Bird, Billie Holiday and Monk.

As a jazz fan and a professional music retailer, I can recommend this book as a wonderful place to begin one's discovery of jazz or gain more knowledge of the cultural legacy of the music. In conjunction with the excellent video series and a box of cds by the titans written about by Ward, ie. Armstrong, Ellington, Davis, Parker, Holiday, etc., one can have a wonderful adventure either discovering the music for the first time or revisiting and expanding old passions. Those who quibble with its incompleteness run the risk of branding themselves cynics after the fashion of Wilde's definition: "A man who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing."

If you're like me, you've always been mystified by the uncanny similarity between Hank Williams and John Lee Hooker, to say nothing of the near-identical vocal qualities of Hank Snow and B.B. King. Luckily, we have a book that explains it all. According to Ed Ward in the first 1/3 of "Rock of Ages," country and rhythm & blues evolved along parallel lines until coming together and producing the country/r&b offspring called rock and roll. Yes, this would certainly explain the vast similaries between Grandpa Jones and Muddy Waters. According to Ward, "the hillbillies were getting radical (musically)" in the early 1950s--hillbillies like Flatt and Scruggs, "Little" Jimmy Dickens, Lefty Frizzel, and Tennessee Ernie Ford. Certainly, when one listen's to Frizzel's "If You've Got the Money I've Got the Time," one can hear a musical revolution in the works. Radical, radical stuff.

As a warm-up to listing such maverick selections as T. Ernie Ford's "Shotgun Boogie," Ward provides scholarly and valuable historical background, including a one-sentence account of the origin of jazz: "In 1902 or thereabouts, someone improvised a countermelody against the one the rest of the band was playing, and the seed of an all-new indigenous American music, jazz, was planted." I frankly prefer this account to the more complicated and stuffy one contained in the 1926 pop song "Birth of the Blues," which features lyrics about new notes pushed through a horn 'til they're born into blue notes, or something like that. That may be more academically correct than Ward's account, but I'd rather be entertained as I learn. And Ward brilliantly sums up the big band era by noting the era's three types of orchestras--"sweet, corn, and swing." By the time rock and roll is born (starting on page 98 with the helpfully-titled chapter, "Rock and Roll Is Born"), we have finished the Ed Ward Roots of Rock Home Study Course, and are ready to digest all of the usual cliches about how rock and roll died (temporarily) in the late 1950s, how Tin Pan Alley took over rock and roll songwriting, etc., and suddenly we're in the 1960s.

Enter Geoffrey Stokes, who tells us all about how "rock" replaced "rock and roll" in 1963, a full 61 years after jazz was invented. (But what happened to "and roll"?)

And so it continues. There are certainly smaller volumes of crank musicology out there, but "Rock of Ages" is probably the most comprehensive collection of pop music mythology to be found anywhere. The authors don't leave a single music-journalistic cliche unturned, and some of the names and titles dropped herein are more than worth checking out. But if you are looking for serious rock musicology, hide thyself from this.

A tour de force of monumental proportions, Geoffrey Stokes has really turned an entire generation of music into a concise yet informative book that truly stimulates the intellect of even the faintest fan of American rock & roll. Clever anecdotes reveal each musician's voice behind timeless classics of the modern era. A must have for all; this book can easily complete a collection or start it. I recommend it with ALL of my critical expertise.

The City is grand. The book does an adequate job in describings sites and getting you around town. Was it the best book? It worked well for us although we were looking for more definitive 'must see's.