Books On Culture: A New Inside The Arts Blog

There’s excitement in the air as today marks the launch of the latest Inside The Arts blog. Books On Culture; discovering books on music and culture with John Rosenkrans is one of the most unique arts and culture blogs to enter the fray since the medium winked into existence several years ago. Although it seems like you can’t swing a virtual dead cat without hitting a book review blog (or reader reviews through mega-sites like Amazon.com) there isn’t a single blog devoted to reviewing books on music and culture – until now…

John’s inaugural review focuses on Sheldon Morgenstern’s No Vivaldi in the Garage: A Requiem for Classical Music in North America and upcoming reviews include Alex Ross’ The Rest Is Noise Frederick S. Lane’s Decency Wars and Rod Parsley Culturally Incorrect. So there is no doubt that this will be a heavy hitting book review blog capable of filling a prolonged void. If that weren’t enough, John will also maintain an ongoing subsection of reviews which focus exclusively on a wide variety of children’s books. In the Book On Culture "About" section, John describes these reviews as:

"I’ll be looking at a wide variety of children’s books, too. There’ll nearly always be a music connection for each of these books as well, and some may include tapes, CDs, or even DVDs. Unbeknownst to them (for now), I’ll be using my two young daughters as proving grounds for some of these books, too – I figure that their perspective will prove far more valuable than mine in some cases."

I think this is going to be one of the most successful components of this new blog as I remember from my private teaching days the regular stream of questions from parents asking about my opinion on music and culture books for their children. I also remember looking for children’s books to place in the waiting room that had some music and/or cultural value to them and having no reliable resources to help guide that process.

Additionally, parents of home-schooled children produced a regular stream of inquires. Not only did they seek guidance to secure worthy reading material but they needed to find books which would be accepted by their respective state/county board of education. As such, the need for a reliable review source such as Books On Culture is considerable and it is comforting to see that need being filled via an Inside The Arts blog.