Scan barcode
diegoo21's review
3.0
It's really good but a little bit too long. In a certain way it's perfect for a certain kind of public. The end Aftershocks chapter is somewhat mundane though.
duparker's review
4.0
3.5 stars. Good overview of the era. Better review of David Bowie and his career. He really owned glam, and the author calories that. There isn't a ton of grit to this book, but the music is crisp and the actual overtones come through. Worth the read.
susannah_n's review
4.0
I usually have little patience for overlong books on popular music, but I loved the essay style of each chapter. David Bowie was, unsurprisingly, a thread in almost every chapter, but otherwise the chapters were quite self-contained, which helped hold my interest. Needless to say, my Glamorama playlist has been getting quite a workout the last couple of weeks.
a_monkey's review against another edition
4.0
One of the musical achievements Simon Reynolds praises in this exhaustive, very insightful book, is Marilyn Manson’s releasing of a trilogy of concept albums in reverse order of their narrative flow. But then he would praise that achievement, because it is what he his own self has completed with the release of this book. The 70s-based SHOCK AND AWE forms the concluding (or opening) chapter of a grand narrative of musical exploration begun (or ended) with the 90s in ENERGY FLASH and continued in the 80s with RIP IT UP AND START AGAIN, and between the three of them they provide hundreds of pages of very smart, passionate engagement with music you know and some music you probably don’t. Highly recommended to own, read, and drop on someone’s head if you want to make damn sure to kill them dead.
verityw's review against another edition
2.0
*****Copy from NetGalley in return for an honest review*****
I found this quite a confusing and frustrating book ultimately. It's clearly very well researched and written by someone who is very knowledgeable about the subject. But while I was interested in the book, the information was presented dense and hard to keep track of. While I was aware of some of the acts and artists that it covers, there were others that I didn't know much about or hadn't heard of and the book didn't do a great job of drawing me into their stories - I ended up skim reading those sections to get to the bits about the people that I had heard of.
I found the final portion of the book quite hard to follow as well - breaking away from the previous structure and moving to a disjointed timeline what didn't always have all the information about the date it was talking about. And boy oh boy is it long.
Interesting premise, flawed execution.
I found this quite a confusing and frustrating book ultimately. It's clearly very well researched and written by someone who is very knowledgeable about the subject. But while I was interested in the book, the information was presented dense and hard to keep track of. While I was aware of some of the acts and artists that it covers, there were others that I didn't know much about or hadn't heard of and the book didn't do a great job of drawing me into their stories - I ended up skim reading those sections to get to the bits about the people that I had heard of.
I found the final portion of the book quite hard to follow as well - breaking away from the previous structure and moving to a disjointed timeline what didn't always have all the information about the date it was talking about. And boy oh boy is it long.
Interesting premise, flawed execution.
julramone13's review against another edition
1.0
DNF, any book that can make a chapter about David Bowie boring is not a book for me.