Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours Binding: Paperback Dewey Decimal Number: 782.421660922 EAN: 9780826428998 ISBN: 0826428991 Label: Continuum International Publishing Group Manufacturer: Continuum International Publishing Group Number Of Items: 1 Number Of Pages: 101 Publication Date: April 15, 2008 Publisher: Continuum International Publishing Group Sales Rank: 83583 Studio: Continuum International Publishing Group
Book Description: John Darnielle describes Master of Reality in the voice of a fifteen-year-old boy being held in an adolescent psychiatric center in southern California in 1985. The narrator explains Black Sabbath like an emissary from an alien race describing his culture to his captors: passionately, patiently, and lovingly. This album has a genuinely remarkable historical status: as a touchstone for the directionless, and as a common coin for young men and women who felt shut out of the broader cultural economy.
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Average Rating:
Rating: - read the fine print
yes, he's pretty great. john darnielle, master of words. oh, the book was good too.
Rating: - Short and sweet.
I feel like I should start out by saying that I am an intensely dedicated fan of Darnielle's many outlets, whether it be his LPTJ blog, The Mountain Goats, The Extra Glenns, his contributions to Decibel, etc. etc. Let me say also that I am pretty sure most of the reviewers (though I haven't read them all) giving this a five star rating are similar in their positions.
I cannot blindly give this book a five, as much as I adore Mr. Darnielle. It was not perfect, as much as a enjoyed it. There were stumbles, in my opinion, where Roger became a little too repetitive, or where some things just seemed oversimplified. But as a whole, especially as his first book, I really enjoyed the book, and it was a quick read. I appreciated it even though I am not a well-versed fan of metal or anything. The character of Roger seemed to cover his bases enough that I could still understand what he was saying about the ... Read More
Rating: - Falls flat
While John Darnielle's rigid personal enforcement of guileless-ness elevates many of his 3-minute songs to a state of genius, that same straight-shooting methodology just doesn't work in the context of a short novel. As a reader, I felt compassion for the unjustly incarcerated teenage narrator Roger Painter (and his mid-twenties incarnation as a restaurant manager), but the connection between his story and Sabbath's "Master of Reality" seemed tenuous at best -- I mean, the same story could have been spun around "Blizzard of Ozz" or the first Whitesnake album or the Misfits' "Walk Among Us" or any of the (many, many) other likely candidates. In the end, as a book, it fell flat for me -- but I bet it would have made a great Mountain Goats song.
Rating: - A gem
A lovely gem of a book. An incredible meditation on fandom and teenage pain, and a truly Foucauldian take, in simple and biting language, on the mental institution as one of this culture's most misbegotten engines of conformity and punishment, which stands in here for everything rock, at its best, rebels against.
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- read the fine print
- Short and sweet.
- Falls flat
