"Boozing and brawling and country music might not be the first things that come to mind when you think of New Hampshire . . . But after reading Sing Me Back Home, you're likely to agree with Dana Jennings, a native of one of the rougher regions of that state, that the feel-bad songs of Hank Williams and George Jones and Loretta Lynn are the soundtrack for the lives we all live."—David Kirby, The New York Times

"Writing from personal and journalistic perspectives, Meltzer packs plenty of solid information into this innovative popular history . . . Students of comparative feminist history, psychology, and modern musical genres will find this absorbing. It provides a personal frame of reference for those who lack their own but have an interest in the music and the era."—Carol J. Binkowski, Bloomfield, New Jersey, Library Journal

“Relays indie's development . . . with uncommon insight . . . [and] makes an impassioned, optimistic case for indie's vitality that doesn't assume readers are coming to [the]  book already well versed in the subject . . . A comprehensive approach to a subject that is too often reduced to discrete parts . . . Fresh and perceptive.”—San Francisco Chronicle

"In his introduction to The Jazz Ear, Ratliff explains what he learned by listening to musicians as they were listening to other players: 'What are the things they notice? What are their criteria for excellence? What makes them react involuntarily? The answers indicate what a musician values in music, which comes to connect what a musician believes music is for in the first place. And that is the big thing, the big question, from which all small questions descend.' That's why The Jazz Ear will be a permanent part of learning how to listen inside the musicians playing . . . Clearly, jazz has also been at the center of the unbroken circle of Ben Ratliff's life all these years."—Nat Hentoff, Jazz Times

“Ratliff suggests, intelligently and persuasively, that Coltrane had, among other attributes, a 'mystic's sensitivity for the sublime, which runs like a secret river under American culture.'  Ratliff patiently explicates Coltrane's legend, writing in short, aphoristic bursts, often as elliptically as his subject played tenor saxophone, but never less than lucidly.”—Pankaj Mishra, The New York Times Book Review

“The Rest Is Noise is a work of immense scope and ambition. The idea is not simply to conduct a survey of 20th-century classical composition but to come up with a history of that century as refracted through its music . . . With its key figures reappearing like motifs in a symphony, The Rest Is Noise is a considerable feat of orchestration and arrangement . . . a great achievement. Rilke once wrote of how he learned to stand ‘more seeingly’ in front of certain paintings. Ross enables us to listen more hearingly.”—Geoff Dyer, The New York Times