Review
Remarkable...it is a book to have you manfully fighting the tears back, but you ll leave feeling uplifted. --xxx
[An] astonishingly heartfelt yet frequently funny memoir… A wonderful book to read and read again. --xxx
When you stick a song on a tape, you set it free,' writes Rob Sheffield. There is something being set free, too, in this spare, touching memoir about death, love and music. Love Is A Mix Tape is not just a brilliant book about how songs can help us through our darkest times, it is also a book that has, with relatively little hindsight to work with, done a brilliant job of nailing down the character of the indie-rock Nineties. It will tell you more about what it was like to live through Generation X than a dozen Nirvana biographies (or, quite possibly, Generation X itself). --Tom Cox
Product Description
In this stunning memoir, Rob Sheffield, a veteran rock and pop culture critic and staff writer for "Rolling Stone" magazine, tells the story of his musical coming of age, and how rock music, the first love of his life, led him to his second, a girl named Renee. Rob and Renee's life together - they wed after graduate school, both became music journalists, and they were married only five years when Renee died suddenly on Mother's Day, 1997 - is shared through the window of the mix tapes they obsessively compiled. There are mixes to court each other, mixes for road trips, mixes for doing the dishes, mixes for sleeping - and, eventually, mixes to mourn Rob's greatest loss. The tunes were among the great musical output of the early 1990s - Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Pavement, Yo La Tengo, REM, Weezer - as well as classics by The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, Aretha Franklin and more. Mixing the skilful, tragic punch of Dave Eggers and the romantic honesty of Nick Homby, "Love Is a Mix Tape" is a story of lost love and the kick-you-in-the-gut energy of great pop music. It's a deeply moving love story, and a testament to music's unique ability to guide us through the most important moments of our lives.
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