Skip to main content

Shopping Cart

You're getting the VIP treatment!

Item(s) unavailable for purchase
Please review your cart. You can remove the unavailable item(s) now or we'll automatically remove it at Checkout.
itemsitem
itemsitem

Recommended For You

Loading...

History & Criticism eBooks

If you like History & Criticism eBooks, then you'll love these top picks.
Showing 1 - 24 of 5802 Results
Skip side bar filters
  • 60 Songs That Explain the '90s

    by Rob Harvilla ...
    **NAMED A BEST MUSIC BOOK OF 2023 by PITCHFORK, VARIETY, AND ROLLING STONEA companion to the #1 music podcast on Spotify, this book takes readers through the greatest hits that define a weirdly undefinable decade.**The 1990s were a chaotic and gritty and utterly magical time for music, a confounding barrage of genres and lifestyles and superstars, from grunge to hip-hop, from sumptuous R&B to ... Read more

    $16.99 USD

  • Shock and Awe

    Glam Rock and Its Legacy, from the Seventies to the Twenty-first Century

    “Tawdry, ridiculous, pretentious, and crass, glam produced some of the most sublime pop music of its era. Now it has a history worthy of it.” —Los Angeles Review of BooksNPR Great Read of 2016Spearheaded by David Bowie, Alice Cooper, T. Rex, and Roxy Music, glam rock reveled in artifice and spectacle. Reacting against the hairy, denim-clad rock bands of the late Sixties, glam was the first true ... Read more

    $12.99 USD or Free with Kobo Plus

  • Mad World

    An Oral History of New Wave Artists and Songs That Defined the 1980s

    A “hugely entertaining” history of the 1980s New Wave music scene told through new interviews with its biggest artists (Rolling Stone).Mad World is a compelling oral history that celebrates the New Wave music phenomenon of the 1980s via new interviews with 35 of the most notable artists of the period. Each chapter begins with a discussion of their most popular song and leads to stories of their ... Read more

    $12.99 USD or Free with Kobo Plus

  • I Want My MTV

    The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution

    **Remember When All You Wanted Was Your MTV?The perfect gift for the music fan or child of the eighties in your life.Named One of the Best Books of 2011 by NPR – Spin - USA Today – CNBC - Pitchfork - The Onion - The Atlantic - The Huffington Post – VEVO - The Boston Globe - The San Francisco Chronicle**Remember the first time you saw Michael Jackson dance with zombies in "Thriller"? Diamond Dave ... Read more

    $16.99 USD

  • The Flatlanders

    Now It's Now Again

    by John T. Davis ...
    Series series American Music Series
    “Conservative West Texas spawns radical creativity and lifelong bonds of friendship in this story of an unlikely band” from the renowned music journalist (Kirkus Reviews).A group of three friends who made music in a house in Lubbock, Texas, recorded an album that wasn’t released and went their separate ways into solo careers. That group became a legend and then—twenty years later—a band. The ... Read more

    $14.99 USD or Free with Kobo Plus

  • From the Velvets to the Voidoids

    The Birth of American Punk Rock

    Exhaustively researched and packed with unique insights, this history journeys from the punk scene's roots in the mid-1960s to the arrival of "new wave" in the early 1980s. With a cast that includes Patti Smith, Pere Ubu, Television, Blondie, the Ramones, the MC5, the Stooges, Talking Heads, and the Dead Boys, this account is the definitive story of early American punk rock. Extraordinarily ... Read more

    $11.99 USD or Free with Kobo Plus

  • Ornette Coleman

    The Territory and the Adventure

    by Maria Golia ...
    With striking photographs and personal insight, a compelling biography of the great American saxophonist and free jazz innovator Ornette Coleman.Ornette Coleman’s career encompassed the glory years of jazz and the American avant-garde. Born in segregated Fort Worth, Texas, during the Great Depression, the African-American composer and musician was zeitgeist incarnate. Steeped in the Texas blues ... Read more

    $19.99 USD

  • A Biographical Guide to the Great Jazz and Pop Singers

    Will Friedwald’s illuminating, opinionated essays—provocative, funny, and personal—on the lives and careers of more than three hundred singers anatomize the work of the most important jazz and popular performers of the twentieth century. From giants like Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Frank Sinatra, and Judy Garland to lesser-known artists like Jeri Southern and Joe Mooney, they have created a ... Read more

    $24.99 USD

  • To Anyone Who Ever Asks

    The Life, Music, and Mystery of Connie Converse

    **Longlisted for the Plutarch AwardThe mysterious true story of Connie Converse—a mid-century New York City songwriter, singer, and composer whose haunting music never found broad recognition—and one writer’s quest to understand her life**This is the mesmerizing story of an enigmatic life. When musician and New Yorker contributor Howard Fishman first heard Connie Converse’s voice on a recording, ... Read more

    $13.99 USD

  • Dvorak's Prophecy: And the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music

    **A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of 2021A provocative interpretation of why classical music in America "stayed white"—how it got to be that way and what can be done about it.**In 1893 the composer Antonín Dvorák prophesied a “great and noble school” of American classical music based on the “negro melodies” he had excitedly discovered since arriving in the United States a year before. But ... Read more

    $18.99 USD

  • Young Marble Giants' Colossal Youth

    Series series 33 1/3
    Welsh post-punk band Young Marble Giants released one LP in 1980 and then, like their vanishing portraits on the album's cover, disappeared. Even though Colossal Youth received positive reviews and sold surprisingly well, Young Marble Giants quickly slid into the margins of rock 'n' roll history-relegated to cult status among post-punk and indie rock fans. Their lasting appeal owes itself to the ... Read more

    $12.99 USD

  • The Vinyl Frontier

    The Story of NASA’s Interstellar Mixtape

    'Bursts with gloriously geeky detail.' The TelegraphHave you ever made someone you love a mix-tape?Forty years ago, a group of scientists, artists and writers gathered in a house in Ithaca, New York to work on the most important compilation ever conceived. It wasn't from one person to another, it was from Earth to the Cosmos.In 1977 NASA sent Voyager 1 and 2 on a Grand Tour of the outer planets. ... Read more

    $12.99 USD

  • Duran Duran's Rio

    by Annie Zaleski ...
    Series series 33 1/3
    In the '80s, the Birmingham, England, band Duran Duran became closely associated with new wave, an idiosyncratic genre that dominated the decade's music and culture. No album represented this rip-it-up-and-start-again movement better than the act's breakthrough 1982 LP, Rio. A cohesive album with a retro-futuristic sound-influences include danceable disco, tangy funk, swaggering glam, and Roxy ... Read more

    $12.99 USD

  • Major Dudes

    A Steely Dan Companion

    A “thoughtful, loving, and thorough portrait” of the pioneering musicians behind Steely Dan, featuring interviews, essays, reviews and more (PopMatters).At its core, Steely Dan is a creative marriage between guitarist Donald Fagen and keyboardist Walter Becker. It recorded several of the cleverest and best-produced albums of the 1970s, making them one of the most successful bands to be inducted ... Read more

    $14.99 USD or Free with Kobo Plus

  • David Bowie Made Me Gay

    100 Years of LGBT Music

    LGBT musicians have shaped the development of music over the last century, with a sexually progressive soundtrack in the background of the gay community’s struggle for acceptance. With the advent of recording technology, LGBT messages were for the first time brought to the forefront of popular music. David Bowie Made Me Gay is the first book to cover the breadth of history of recorded music by and ... Read more

    $12.99 USD or Free with Kobo Plus

  • Loft Jazz

    Improvising New York in the 1970s

    The New York loft jazz scene of the 1970s was a pivotal period for uncompromising, artist-produced work. Faced with a flagging jazz economy, a group of young avant-garde improvisers chose to eschew the commercial sphere and develop alternative venues in the abandoned factories and warehouses of Lower Manhattan. Loft Jazz provides the first book-length study of this period, tracing its history amid ... Read more

    $24.99 USD

  • George Michael's Faith

    Series series 33 1/3
    On Saturday, June 28, 1986, George Michael picked up his tasselled leather jacket, walked out of London's Wembley Stadium and cheerfully tore up five years of glittering pop history. He'd just disposed of Wham!, the band he'd formed with school friend Andrew Ridgeley when they were teenagers, and now, at 23, he knew he was all grown up. He just needed to convince everyone else.Faith is what ... Read more

    $12.99 USD

  • They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

    *Best Books of 2018 —Rolling Stone"A Best Book of 2017" —NPR, Buzzfeed, Paste Magazine, Esquire, Chicago Tribune, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, CBC, Stereogum, National Post, Entropy, Heavy, Book Riot, Chicago Review of Books, The Los Angeles Review, Michigan Daily*American Booksellers Association (ABA) 'December 2017 Indie Next List Great Reads'<br ... ... Read more

    $9.99 USD or Free with Kobo Plus

  • Beethoven for a Later Age

    Living with the String Quartets

    “A richly detailed portrayal of the intimate workings of a great string quartet . . . as revealed to us through the recollections of its first violinist.”—Philip RothEdward Dusinberre, first violinist of the renowned Takács Quartet, offers a rare peek inside the workings of his ensemble, while providing an insightful history of Beethoven’s sixteen string quartets and their performance.Founded in ... Read more

    $14.99 USD or Free with Kobo Plus

  • The Great Jazz and Pop Vocal Albums

    The author of the magisterial A Biographical Guide to the Great Jazz and Pop Singers now approaches the great singers and their greatest work in an innovative and revelatory way: through considering their finest albums, which is the format in which this music was most resonantly organized and presented to its public from the 1940s until the very recent decline of the CD. It is through their albums ... Read more

    $4.99 USD

  • Led Zeppelin IV

    Led Zeppelin IV, often called heavy metal's greatest album, kicks off an exciting new series that takes a fresh, in-depth look at some of the greatest works from the most influential artists of the rock era. Fans may know the songs, but wait until they hear the stories behind them!The music contained in Led Zeppelin IV is part of the soundtrack to a generation. Released in 1971, it rocks, stomps, ... Read more

    $14.99 USD

  • My Old Man: A Personal History of Music Hall

    by John Major ...
    Shortlisted for the Theatre Book Prize; former prime minister John Major takes a remarkable journey into his own unconventional family past to tell the richly colourful story of the British music hall.Music hall was one of the glories of Victorian England. Sentimental, vulgar, but patriotic and champion of the underdog, it held a mirror to the audiences’ hopes, fears and the general absurdity of ... Read more

    $1.99 USD $0.99 USD

  • Beethoven's Cello: Five Revolutionary Sonatas and Their World

    Winner of the 2018 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title AwardIn 1796 the young Beethoven presented his first two cello sonatas, Op. 5, at the court of Frederick William II, an avid cellist and the reigning Prussian monarch. Released in print the next year, these revolutionary sonatas forever altered the cello repertoire by fundamentally redefining the relationship between the cello and the piano and ... Read more

    $17.99 USD

  • Blood, Fire, Death

    The Swedish Metal Story

    Series series Extreme Metal
    The emergence of death metal in the beginning of the 90’s changed the metal scene forever. Many of the seminal bands came from Sweden. Why did this small mild-mannered country become the hotbed for such aggressive and extreme music? Blood, Fire, Death explores the bands, individuals and phenomena which have propelled the scene forward and still does to this day. The book investigates the politics, ... Read more

    $20.99 USD or Free with Kobo Plus