Interesting effort and a valid compliment to a guitarist's library. The alternating focus between American guitar history and a Vermont luthier's build is an effective vehicle for this guitar story. Ultimately this book fails to satisfy though. The book's central character, the author, is not self-portrayed as a very likeable character. It's like reading and interesting story while a man shoots himself in the foot.

There's a lot of good information here, but the memoir is soiled by petty asides that make the author seem small.

A good news-bad news book to be sure. The good news is that it's a very readable history of the guitar and often quite insightful. I can't imagine any guitar player not getting something of value out of this book. On the other hand it is very uneven. The author admits the book is not for the scholar,fine, but it could have stood a good tightening up by the author or a good editor, light read or not. As pointed out by another reviewer the Holly chapter is the best example, but there are many others. Also the author has a real attitude about dreadnaught shaped guitars! This is a re-occurring theme throughout the book. This sort of snide attitude shows up too often in the book on other subjects as well. One can almost picture the author in self satisfied reverie, sitting on his porch in the pristine Vermont woods, a Starbucks nearby, stroking his beloved handmade guitar as he puts the finishing touches on his manuscript. It's not a bad read but has a definite amateur quality about it.

One of my favorite music-oriented books of all time. The style of alternating chapters between the building of his custom guitar and the role the guitar (and other stringed instruments) played in music history is very well done. I've read it three times -- once as written, once just on the chapters about guitar throughout history, and once on the chapters about the building of his guitar. Not only do I recommend it, I've purchased it as a gift for another guitar friend of mine. Great for acoustic guitarists and enthusiasts, but can be appreciated by any musician

This review is NOT about the content of the book. I believe it is an excellent work. However, I paid for a "new" book, and the book that arrived had multiple tears in the dust jacket, making it unusable as a gift. The packaging was secure and undamaged, so the book was placed into the container in damaged condition. I did not have enough lead time to send it back for a replacement, as the birthday of the recipient was just a couple of days away from the time it was received. This was very disappointing and will certainly make me think twice about ordering books intended as gifts from Amazon.

I must beg to differ with the reviewer who found this a "masterful bit of prose." Although Brookes's book is an enjoyable light read, it's hardly masterful. I noted factual errors and redundancies that suggest a rush to publication; and given its well-defined subject, it's surprising that the book is not more cohesive. We get a few long digressions, such as the story of Buddy Holly's disastrous final tour, that have nothing whatsoever to do with the cultural history of the guitar. The Holly story is well worth telling but I don't see why it's worth telling in this book, and indeed many of the historical chapters feel randomly organized, jumping from one topic to another with no sense of a common thread.

And I find Brookes's fussiness hard to stomach, frankly. He shrinks in repulsion from guitars with sunbursts. He is horrified at the cheapness of guitars at Wal-Mart. I mean, give me a break. The book interweaves cultural history with the story of the building of Brookes's custom guitar, and some reviewers have suggested that it would have been nice to hear more about the latter, but personally I find the whole idea of middle-aged men spending thousands of dollars on elite guitars a little distasteful. I can see how this part of Brookes's story would be appealing to a certain kind of lutherie geek, but to me it's just contrary to the spirit of the cultural history Brookes is trying to represent elsewhere.

Or maybe this is the story of the guitar in America: humble instrument of the poor and dispossessed becomes fetish object of white upper classes.

I'm not sorry Brookes wrote the book -- as I say, it was an enjoyable light read, and if you're a music nerd you probably already know that this is an uneven genre. Brookes's coverage of the Hawaiian steel guitar craze was especially interesting. But there are better books on American music, and I suspect that even this author had a better book in him than the one he's given us.