Very uneven. Some chapters are illustrative and informative, though never reaching excellence, while others fall flat, reading as unedited unproofed meanderings on the author's favorite artists (or merely the ones that would consent to an interview). Not at all an academic study of the culture, not a firsthand account; these are the opinions and observations of a longtime fan, amateur chronicler, and participant--not useless, not as useful as I'd hoped. ( )

Adequate (I say generously) introduction to the situation of electronica in cultural studies.

I thought that Chapter 9, "A History of Festival Culture," offered fairly well-documented and helpful contextualization, even though, as with the rest of the book, it could benefit from no small amount of editing and proofreading (for example, last I checked, Bakhtin isn't French). Alternately, Cummins's highly fraught and ambivalent discussion of drugs in chapter 13 confused me considerably, since its tone swerved so often between a clear-eyed observation of the role of drugs in party culture and a self-conscious anti-drug polemic.

Unfortunately, this book needs serious editing. In short, this reads like the freshman composition paper that goes on forever. A new thread of discourse in contemporary culture needs a better ambassador than this. ( )

Ambrosia is an interesting sort of book. We've all read some study of a particular kind of music or a branch of the art world, and in that sense it does an excellent job of explaining the various genres and sub-genres (house, garage, trance, techno, break-beats, drum n' bass and hardcore), the people and places where this music came to life. What's unusual about this is the immediacy of it all. There is no filtering through time and history - the artists and DJs are people you here on the radio, titles that you've probably got on your iPod right now. The nightclubs and rave scenes are places you could go to this weekend (well, assuming you can afford a last minute flight to New York or Ibiza). This makes the book current in a way that is really appealing to me.

Now, that also means that there is no great historical distance on these artists and their music. While there is no denying this is a well-established genre and one that will likely continue to influence popular music for a long time, it is still too new, I think, to draw a lot of big, important conclusions. Author James Cummins tries - too hard, at times - to make big and broad statements about the impact of electronica music. This is still a young genre and only time will tell its long-term impact on the culture that surrounds it.

Cummins also paints a rather idyllic picture of the nightclubs and raves where electronica is most popular. As in all musical arenas, there are bad guys and good guys, but reading Ambrosia might give you the impression that the fans of electronica are all staunch anti-drug advocates; this has certainly not been my experience of raves and nightclubs. But if Cummins has an overly-rosy view of the scene, it's easy to overlook it. He quite obviously loves the music and is really passionate and enthusiastic about these artists and their work, and that scores real points with me.

I will say that my copy could have used a final edit for grammar and sentence structure (mixed tenses are painful to read). Still, if you are a fan of any sort of electronic music, it makes a very enjoyable read. ( )

Like previous reviewers, I usually don't bother with more than, "It wasn't for me" as, being a writer myself, I know (or can imagine, anyway) how unpleasant it can be to discover one's work being panned in public.

But I got this book from the Librarything Early Reviewer program, so I have to review it, and I will not tell a lie: I found this book very poorly written, with a great effort put into intellectual airs of scholarship, but asserting the same sorts of things one heard ravers claim back in the day -- lots of grandiose claims and pretensions, but not much solid research or analysis of those claims. Like, for example, "Why does rave culture have a segment that insists so stridently on its positive contribution to society through partying?" or "Why are New Age religious tropes also commonly found in the rhetoric of rave culture fans?" These are the kinds of questions I hoped would be examined in this book, but the first chunk of the text leaves me with little faith Cummings went so far as to think that hard about his subject. It's one thing when a fan makes assertions as a fan, but to do so when pretending to write "about a culture" with a veneer of scholarship slapped onto it. I didn't make it much past page 20 or so, which is my limit for giving an author a chance these days.

In Cummins' defense, I find this is often true of fans: they make poor critics of their most beloved topics. But who was editing this thing? ( )

(Well, now I have a moral dilemma: I don't usually bother giving negative reviews - there are better ways to spend my time and energy. However, the only condition for the LT "Early Reviewer" program is that you review the books you receive... so, here goes....)

I requested this from LT's "Early Reviewers" program because back in the late Pleistocene, I was a DJ myself. I knew bits of the story from the early days in the '70s, when the NY underground music scene bumped up against the early punk scene and the gay scene. But that was long, long before the modern 'rave' scene, and I was genuinely curious about What The Kids Are Up To These Days.

Now, I'm a pretty omnivorous reader: I'll read almost anything that falls into my field of vision. I've read stuff that I've recognized at the time of reading to be not worth the investment of time. All I ask of a book is that - AT MINIMUM - it not leave me stupider AFTER reading it than I was before I started it.

This book fails that very low standard.

This is a book about a pop scene, a scene that I'm too old to have direct experience of. I was perfectly willing to overlook the poor writing, the poor editing, the lack of
any organization, the lack of much in the way of actual information....I was willing to give this book a chance to tell me something I didn't know.

I made it through the various typos and the infelicities...and then I hit this passage on p. 49:

"This kind of wonder and lust for life is reflected in Germany's most famous spectacle: the Love Parade. The Love Parade was first held as a protest to Communist occupation in 1988, held in Berlin four months before the Berlin Wall was torn down. Its original name was "Friede, Freude, Eierkuchen", which is German for "happiness and well-being."

Now, I'm about as close to monolingual as makes no difference. Nevertheless,
even I possess enough German to be offended by that attempt at a translation.

No, "Friede, Freude, Eierkuchen" does not mean that. The author is in the right ballpark, but he's missed the joke entirely, and he's not sharing the joke with his readers. He seems to be unaware that there IS a joke. ("Eierkuchen"?) And nobody in the entire production chain for this book thought to ask a German-speaker, or even to look it up on the internet.

And there goes this reader's confidence in his guide: What else is the author clueless about?

(But even putting the bad translation to one side for a moment: to my knowledge, the first Love Parade was in the summer of 1989, as the Berlin Wall came down in November of 1989. So what are "1988" and "four months before" supposed to refer to? Was there really an earlier version of the Love Parade back in '88? Like the test answer says: "There is not enough information in this passage to decide.")

This book is misinforming me about the little I DO know on this topic.

See Rule One, above: Reading a book should not make you LESS informed than when you started.

I know essentially nothing about this subject, was willing to fight my way through the writing in hope of learning something: but I was stopped cold by the inaccuracies presented here.

Maybe what I've learned is to be more careful before I commit myself to reading books offered to me by strangers.

On the plus side, the author is certainly enthusiastic about the subject, and seems to have talked to a number of people involved in varies aspects of the scene. But even here, at the level of basic journalism, the author is confusing his subjective knowledge of various events with the objective importance of the events he reports: there is much here that seems wildly off-topic, and much else that seems... disproportionate.

(E.g.: I read about 1/3 of this book, and - although he is name-checked, and his club is of course mentioned - there is essentially no personal information presented about Frankie Knuckles, the DJ who invented the scene. That strikes me a something of an oversight. There's more information presented here on Andy Warhol, who had nothing at all to do with the scene. I don't think there's a word about the prehistory of the scene, when disco started mutating all-night dance parties. Nothing on Larry Levan and the Paradise Garage, say. Or about how both Levan AND Knuckles got their start back at the Continental Baths.)

A Must To Avoid. ( )