Dangerous Melodies by Jonathan Rosenberg

This book’s full title is Dangerous Melodies: Classical Music in America from the Great War through the Cold War. I personally love reading history. This is quite a different approach to history as it is through the lens of music. I had not thought about or before considered the effect of classical music, which is all from Europe, on people in the US during the first and second world wars and the cold war.

Classical music comes from Europe. I had not realized about the anti-German feelings in the US during the first world war. You hardly hear about this. I know that Germans were the second largest immigrant group to the US and the third largest in Canada (after the French and English) prior to the second world war.

I have German relatives in Canada who immigrated in the mid to late 1800’s and were in Canada during the first and second world war. I know that my great-grandfather, who died in 1905 was basically a German speaker, but my grandfather was bilingual, and my father, who was born in 1914 spoke only English and grew up in a home that spoke English. I know people in the community felt that they had to keep their heads down and not cause any trouble, but they also signed up for service in both world wars.

There is a short review of this book on Kirkus Reviews. On NPR News they show highlights of a review with the author by Scott Simons. Tim Page at the Washington Post has great an easy read on this book.

Jonathan Rosenberg speaks at Politics and Prose on his book Dangerous Melodies. The Q&A starts at around 33 minutes into the video. This is a rather long video speech by Jonathan Rosenberg on C-Span.

An index of the books I have reviewed are on my website at Books. I have three blogs. The first talks only about specific stocks and is called Investment Talk . The second one contains information on mostly investing and is called Investing Economics Mostly. My last blog is for my book reviews and it is called Non-Fiction Mostly. Follow me on Twitter.