A treat for 1970s and ’80s rock fans who never stopped believin’.
An oral history of the hard-to-define, easy-to-love rock music genre.
You might not have heard the term “album-oriented rock,” or “AOR,” but you know the music when you hear it. The genre that ruled the airwaves in the late 1970s and most of the ’80s, AOR was marked by melodic, hard-edged rock with high production values: Think Journey, Heart, or Kansas, and imagine you’re driving down the highway on a hot summer night, and you’re on the right track. Music journalist Rees tells the story of the genre’s ascendancy, which at the time “was as much the reigning soundtrack of Middle America as country music is today.” Rees credits the beginnings of AOR—originally a radio-industry term of art—to Boston’s self-titled 1976 debut album and its smash-hit lead single, “More Than a Feeling.” Its success led to hits from other bands, including REO Speedwagon, Styx, and Toto, which delighted listeners but rankled critics: As Dennis DeYoung of Styx said, “The fact of the matter is, Foreigner, like all of those bands in the ’70s, were immediately dismissed by people in the rock press. Because they had the audacity to write memorable songs that people liked.” MTV debuted in 1981 and maybe led to the genre’s eventual decline: Rees flags Billy Squier’s so-bad-it’s-just-really-bad 1984 video for “Rock Me Tonite” as a canary in the coal mine for the genre, which lost its appeal to mainstream listeners who ended up turning to country. Rees does a great job compiling quotes and anecdotes drawn from interviews with musicians, producers, and journalists; it’s a tightly edited oral history that manages to be both informative and entertaining. He also makes a good case that the genre never disappeared but rather “seeped back into the mainstream” and “ingrained itself into the fabric of American music.” This is a deeply fun look at music that might have lacked hipster cachet but, for a period of time, defined a nation.
A treat for 1970s and ’80s rock fans who never stopped believin’.Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2026
ISBN: 9780306836046
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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