5. The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

The Rest is Noise: Listening to
the Twentieth Century
By Alex Ross
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
448 pages
$27.95

A history of a violent, chaotic, transformative century told through its bizarre and challenging classical music. Ross is a supremely gifted writer who brings the political and technological richness of the world inside the magic circle of the concert hall, so that each illuminates the other. He has the critic's gift of allowing you to hear music the way he does; he writes about the works of daunting titans like Strauss and Schoenberg, Messiaen and Reich and Cage, in a way that makes them accessible, but without sacrificing his intellectual ambition or the technical precision of his critical language.