Amanda Petrusich

Even with a few tiny flaws, this is one of the best books I've read all year. Petrusich immerses herself in the weird, wild world of collectors of 78s (and you thought book collectors were an interesting bunch ...), digging into archives, listening to rare records in collectors' living rooms, pawing through flea-market detritus hoping to find a diamond in the rough. And she makes it great fun to ride along.

I will say, I found it very handy to have YouTube handy as I read, since there are many times when Petrusich goes into great detail about fascinating recordings and it's a real benefit to be able to pull them up and listen along (I know, I know, it's a totally different experience to hear the music on a turntable as compared to the speaker on an iPhone, but it's better than nothing).

There are a couple little missteps: a whole section in which the author learns to scuba dive so that she can search a stretch of the Milwaukee River in a very strange effort to possibly find fragments of discarded records there didn't work for me, and there were areas where I wished she had gone into more detail instead of taking what seemed like the easy way out. But for all that, this is a really neat look at a small community of dedicated and enthusiastic folks who are doing their part to preserve the cultural heritage which exists on these old 78s.… (mehr)