Dazzling and original, Sonata for Jukebox is a brilliant foray into how pop music has woven itself into our lives since the dawn of the recording age. Geoffrey O'Brien delves into twentieth-century pop music as we experience it: a phenomenon that is at once public and private, personal yet popular. O'Brien's book is more than a history of pop music, although fragments of that history find their way into its pages. And it reaches far beyond a memoir, although it is an entertaining biography of the author's ears and his family's exceptional affinity with pop music-his father was a leading New York DJ and his grandfather led a dance band in Philadelphia. Ultimately, it is an exploration of what we as listeners hear, what we think we hear, and how we connect that experience with the rest of our lives. The dizzying array of musical references plays like a soundtrack as O'Brien explores how our lives are lived in the presence-and in the memory of the presence -of music. "Sonata for Jukebox attempts the impossible: to give a sense, however imperfect, partial, blurred, biased, of that amplitude of music. It is recklessly inclusive, supererogatively profuse in its desire to account for at least the possibility of everything now extant and someday to be. From the initial footsteps of biography and autobiography it charts a course farther and farther out until it parts the curtains onto a vision of the infinite. The rush of references and inventions is dizzying, headlong.
- New York Review of Books

Dazzling and original, Sonata for Jukebox is a brilliant foray into how pop music has woven itself into our lives since the dawn of the recording age. Geoffrey O'Brien delves into twentieth-century pop music as we experience it: a phenomenon that is at once public and private, personal yet popular. O'Brien's book is more than a history of pop music, although fragments of that history find their way into its pages. And it reaches far beyond a memoir, although it is an entertaining biography of the author's ears and his family's exceptional affinity with pop music-his father was a leading New York DJ and his grandfather led a dance band in Philadelphia. Ultimately, it is an exploration of what we as listeners hear, what we think we hear, and how we connect that experience with the rest of our lives. The dizzying array of musical references plays like a soundtrack as O'Brien explores how our lives are lived in the presence-and in the memory of the presence -of music. "Sonata for Jukebox attempts the impossible: to give a sense, however imperfect, partial, blurred, biased, of that amplitude of music. It is recklessly inclusive, supererogatively profuse in its desire to account for at least the possibility of everything now extant and someday to be. From the initial footsteps of biography and autobiography it charts a course farther and farther out until it parts the curtains onto a vision of the infinite. The rush of references and inventions is dizzying, headlong.
- New York Review of Books