This Book is Broken
A Broken Social Scene Story
Stuart Berman
Anansi
ISBN: 978-0-8874-796-7
Buy at Amazon
File Under: Non-Fiction, Music, Broken

I'll admit that before I received this book to review I didn't know much about Broken Social Scene. I knew the name, I think I knew they were from Canada and I think my friend Thom likes them. That is about all I knew. This book and the enthusiasm it shows for them really got me excited to check them out.

This book gives a detailed account of the Toronto indie scene around 2000 to present. You can feel the love of the music that comes pouring out of the interviews in the book. Anyone who has ever been a part of an emerging scene knows the feeling of excitement, the feeling that you can create anything that comes pouring out of the interviews in this book.

This book takes a fairly standard format at this point. Berman interviews several members of Broken Social Scene and the Toronto indie rock scene in general and breaks up quotes from each of these interviews into discrete chapters. This book is a little different than most in that it also includes a page or two of introductory text to each of those chapters. As anyone who has read my previous reviews knows, I am not usually a fan of this format because it makes the narrative uneven. I will say in this case the author has seemed to go out of the way to arrange the quotes to tell a cohesive story.

It is choc-full of photos that really help give the reader the idea that they are there. This book of course is for anyone who is a fan of Broken Social Scene, but it is also recommended so that you can experience the sense of belonging to a scene and the general excitement and friendship expressed on its pages.

I judge this book by the fact that it made me spend some time looking around for not just Broken Social Scenes music, but the music of other bands mentioned.