Jim Miller

Describes the stars, fans, promoters, producers, the festivals, disc jockeys, the record industry, and the culture that grew up around rock music.

"Where did Rock and Roll come from? And what has it come to?"--BOOK JACKET. "These are the sorts of questions that cultural historian and veteran music journalist Jim Miller raises in his new book about the rise - and arrested development - of rock and roll. Concentrating on the music in its early, formative decades, he explores how rock and roll was transformed from a joyous and sometimes earthy dance music in the 1940s into an abrasive, often angry art music by the end of the 1970s. Along the way, he celebrates a culture of youthful exuberance - and critically analyzes how it was organized into a billion-dollar global industry."--BOOK JACKET.

Before the good life was reduced to a bottle of Prozac, philosophers offered arresting answers to the most fundamental questions about who we are and what makes a life worth living. In The Philosophical Life, James Miller returns to this vibrant tradition with short, lively biographies of twelve famous philosophers, examining the interplay of their life and thought. From Plato, who risked his reputation to tutor a tyrant, to Nietzsche who tried to get to grips with the human condition before lapsing into catatonic madness, Miller lays out the lives and thought of our greatest thinkers with flair and rich anecdote.

Today, democracy is the world's only broadly accepted political system, and yet it has become synonymous with disappointment and crisis. How did it come to this? In Can Democracy Work? James Miller, the author of the classic history of 1960s protest Democracy Is in the Streets, offers a lively, surprising, and urgent history of the democratic idea from its first stirrings to the present. As he shows, democracy has always been rife with inner tensions. The ancient Greeks preferred to choose leaders by lottery and regarded elections as inherently corrupt and undemocratic. The French revolutionaries sought to incarnate the popular will, but many of them came to see the people as the enemy. And in the United States, the franchise would be extended to some even as it was taken from others. Amid the wars and revolutions of the twentieth century, communists, liberals, and nationalists all sought to claim the ideals of democracy for themselves--even as they manifestly failed to realize them.