We Gotta Get Out of This Place

There's far too much ground covered by this book to adequately deal with it in a scant 300 pages, but Hirshey tries her best to do so. What this subject really needs, though, is a huge Ken Burns-style documentary with accompanying soundtrack, because reading about the various artists Hirshey talks about (and to) made me want to dig through my CD collection.

It seems at times Hirshey gears the book towards the people that she's come to know over the years, which is the only main complaint I have with this - as one example, the “divas” phenomenon gets the lion's share of the late 1990s chapter, with significantly less space spent on the Lilith Fair crowd. Maybe it's just a question of where I was coming from at the time, but I think that the focus of those two, at least, should have been reversed.