Number One Songs: The First Twenty Years

Irons, a former radio disc jockey who landed his first job in Reno in 1967, decided to parlay his love of radio into a long-form poem consisting of one rhyming verse about each #1 song in the U.S. from 1956 through 1975, occasionally including . interesting biographical details about the artists. Readers will have to really love music to tolerate Irons’s epic. The rhymes are trite, albeit sometimes whimsical, and the whole piece would have benefited from very serious editing, particularly when Irons loses focus and veers off on autobiographical tangents. Twenty years of songs also isn’t a strong theme to organize a book around—and therefore the collection feels unwieldy. Readers may want to skip this altogether and go straight to Irons’s source, The Billboard Book of Top 40 Hits, to learn about the music itself. (BookLife)