"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 Weekly

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 proposesa rediscovery of the musical wisdom of Plato and Aristotlewill completely change the way we think about music.

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. His articles have appeared in the Review of Politics and Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy.

Nadia May has been nominated as an AudioFile Golden Voice five years running and is a winner of fourteen AudioFile Earphones Awards. She is the co-founder of TheatreFirst, a theater company in the San Francisco Bay Area where she currently lives.