Reviews for THE ILLUSTRATED HISTORY OF WORLD WAR II

The average rating for THE ILLUSTRATED HISTORY OF WORLD WAR II based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-01-28 00:00:00 Louise Currin I met Greil Marcus one weekday afternoon when I was supposed to be at work; I was leafing through sale books in the basement of Politics and Prose here in DC and he was at a table surrounded by copies of his newest book on Dylan getting ready to give a reading. I said "hi" and picked up a copy without asking and flipped through it and told him Love and Theft might be the best record of Dylan's career. Marcus didn't seem to be particularly interested in talking with me, so I put his book back down right in front of him and my greasy thumb left a big print on the shiny cover near Dylan's face that Marcus seemed to take note of with displeasure. True story.

Review # 2 was written on 2009-07-15 00:00:00 Kristen Deluca This isn't just a book about the history of punk, peeps: this traces the spirit of negation, of scandalized, moral indignation, back into the French Revolution, through surrealism and Dada and the Situationists. As academically rigorous as it is stylishly written, it is an absolute must if you are a music lover in any way, a true classic of the oft-pilloried category of Cultural Studies: it crosses disciplinary boundaries in the most intellectually fertile way imaginable, yet jettisons none of the rigor of traditional scholarship and reads like it was written by a novelist influenced by Hunter S Thompson and, say, Joseph Heller, in that it is propelled forward by a driving, irrepressible energy even as it lingers on the smallest of evocative details (such as why Jonathan Richman's "One-two-three-four-five-six" at the beginning of his classic song "Roadrunner", a paean to the imaginative power of rock n roll on the radio, changed the world forever.