Twilight of the gods A journey to the end of classic rock

twilight of the gods By Steven Hyden. (Dey Street, $25.99.) As the rock icons of the 20th century become increasingly geriatric, Hyden explores the history and significance of groups like the Rolling Stones, Fleetwood Mac and the Eagles - and how their music changed the culture. sh?tshow By Charlie LeDuff. (Penguin Press, $27.) LeDuff, a journalist often given the moniker "gonzo," traveled the country seeking out real Americans, putting him on the front lines of what he calls the decline of the United States, facts and fears By James R. Clapper with Trey Brown. (Viking, $30.) Clapper's memoir covers his eventful years as director of national intelligence, a period that spanned the raid on Osama bin Laden, the Benghazi attack, the leaks of Edward Snowden and - most consequentially - Russia's interference in the last presidential election, the summer i met jack By Michelle Gable. (St. Martin's, $27.99.) This novel is based on the real story of Alicia Darr, a postwar refugee who worked in the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port, Mass. Prom there some imagination takes over as Gable recounts this unlikely love story of a future president's romance with the European maid. Harvey milk By Lillian Faderman. (Yale, $25.) The first openly gay man elected to public office in the United States, Harvey Milk was a San Francisco city supervisor until his assassination in 1978. Faderman puts Milk's story into context, describing how, being both Jewish and gay, he felt himself to be a double outsider. "My favorite sort of novel is the one that seems at first a genteel tale of family life, then cracks open to illuminate the world. The so-called domestic (an epithet we almost only apply to books by women) story that ends up being about something bigger than one family's life. Shirley Hazzard's the transit of venus is the best example of such I've read since slogging through Henry James. Hazzard is better, actually, because her book isn't an endurance test but rather sheer exhilaration. The sentences are flawless, the story (of two orphaned Australian sisters making their way in the world) riveting. Describing a bedroom, Hazzard writes, 'Even a mildewed snapshot of an English cottage, if it was labelled 1915, was smirched and spattered with a brown consciousness of the trenches.' That's the book in a nutshell: a canny and moving examination of how the two world wars affected everything that came thereafter." - RUMAAN ALAM, SPECIAL PROJECTS EDITOR, BOOKS, ON WHAT HE'S READING.

Music critic Hyden (Your Favorite Band Is Killing Me) explores the evolution of classic rock in this sharp collection of essays. Hyden looks back at bands such as Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd, whose mythical status drew him in as a teenager, and traces their legacy to contemporary acts such as Japandroids, a Canadian guitar-and-drums stadium rock duo. Classic rock began, Hyden maintains, with the Beatles' 1967 release of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, "where the Beatles officially stopped being lovable mop-topped pop stars and became serious rock intellectuals." Hyden's critiques are consistently on target and humorous: according to Hyden, the Eagles were not popular because they were particularly good as a band, but because they were "craven capitalists" who "were cool like the captain of the high school baseball team was cool." Hyden is also acutely aware of the overwhelming straight white maleness of the classic rock canon, dissecting his own teenage listening experience through a socially aware lens ("On the classic-rock station-with the exception of Jimi Hendrix and Phil Lynott of Thin Lizzy-there were no black artists"). Hyden has created a hilariously opinionated personal history of classic rock that should resonate with his fellow genre enthusiasts. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.