The national debate over popular music’s effect on character is both furious and confused. Conservatives complain primarily about lyrics, appealing to public decency and safety. Liberals, swift to the defense of any self-expression, simultaneously celebrate rock’s liberating ethos and deny its cultural influence. Carson Holloway is out to shatter the assumptions of pop’s critics and defenders alike, showing that music is more beneficial than we think.
Plato and Aristotle, Holloway finds, were aware that music can either inflame the soul with passion or can awaken it to reason and help to cultivate temperance. What Holloway proposes—a rediscovery of the musical wisdom of Plato and Aristotle—will completely change the way we think about music.
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“This book wonderfully demonstrates just how radical—and how relevant—is the ancient call for a music that calms the passions and offers sensory beauty to youngsters, not as a stimulant, but as a foretaste of sweet reason.”
— Darrell Dobbs, Marquette University
“The great virtue of All Shook Up is its unfashionable insistence that music be taken seriously.”
— Wall Street Journal“Refreshing…may well appeal to both critics and defenders of pop music.”
— Publishers WeeklyBe the first to write a review about this audiobook!
Carson Holloway is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Nebraska at Omaha and the 2005–06 William E. Simon Fellow in the James Madison Program at Princeton University. A recipient of a John M. Olin Foundation faculty fellowship and research grants from the H. B. Earhart Foundation, his articles have appeared in the Review of Politics and Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy.
Wanda McCaddon (d. 2023) narrated well over six hundred titles for major audiobook publishers, sometimes with the pseudonym Nadia May or Donada Peters. She earned the prestigious Audio Award for best narration and numerous Earphones Awards. She was named a Golden Voice by AudioFile magazine.