All Music Guide

Arranged in sixteen musical categories, provides entries for twenty thousand releases from four thousand artists, and includes a history of each musical genre.

This fun-to-read, easy-to-use reference has been completely updated, expanded, and revised with reviews of over 12,000 great albums by over 2,000 artists and groups in all rock genres. 50 charts.

Reviews and rates the best recordings of 8,900 blues artists in all styles.

Covers more than eighteen thousand recordings and more than 1,700 musicians from across the jazz spectrum and includes a history of the different types of jazz, the evolution of jazz instruments, and essays on styles.

Reviews and rates the best recordings of country artists and groups, provides biographies of the artists, and charts the evolution of country music

With informative biographies, essays, and "music maps, " this book is the ultimate guide to the best recordings in rhythm and blues. 20 charts.

This comprehensive guide profiles the careers of hundreds of major artists, such as Aphex Twin and the Prodigy, and reviews thousands of the best electronica recordings. Incisive essays explore electronica's widely varied subgenres. 20 charts.

Collects reviews for one thousand enduring classic rock albums ranging from the extremely popular to more obscure works.

Offering comprehensive coverage of classical music, this guide surveys more than eleven thousand albums and presents biographies of five hundred composers and eight hundred performers, as well as twenty-three essays on forms, eras, and genres of classical music. Original.

In Mind Searching Nyamnjoh has attempted to do something rather clever - to expose, through the attitudes, feelings and thoughts of one man and a very simple story, the hypocrisy and corruption of Cameroon society and humanity in general, often using understatement and irony in good effect. The commentary is unremittingly cynical and returns again and again to corruption, callous squandering, exploitation, prostitution, and other fairly worn butts. The book depicts a society where basic freedoms are shackled, and thinking aloud treasonable. Hence the mental ramblings of the narrator and central character Judascious Fanda Yanda, in the form of an extended monologue full of observations, anecdotes and asides written from the point of view of an apparently insouciant naive. The basic method is to foreground the opinions and conversational elegance of the narrator, while having events going on as a background to his thoughts. We trace the narrator's progress from a disenchanted 'Damn de la Terre' to a comfortably well off Private Secretary to a Vice Minister over a number of years. It is a clear illustration of how the system perpetuates its mediocrity and buys off any spark of initiative. Nyamnjoh has a good command of ironic tone and sound control over form and structure. He employs a very fluent style, and often has very urbane and neat turns of phrase. He captures the bored, superior, cynical and ultimately predatory tone of voice of his narrator extremely well.