Mount TBR #14

I read this book for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge hosted over at My Reader’s Block from January 1 – December 31, 2015. The challenge is to read books that you already own.

Jazz in American Culture – Burton W. Peretti, 1997

Peretti obtained a Ph.D. in History from UC Berkeley in 1989 with specialties in politics, culture and music so he’s qualified to write an overview like this. In Jazz in American Culture he argues that jazz has been “central to the development of American culture since 1900” and that its story “tells us a great deal about the ideas, feelings, and activities of Americans in the century.”  It’s such a broad thesis that we rather expect a hodge-podge of a book, but he knows his audience (undergraduates) so the decade by decade order seems appropriate and so does the journalistic prose.