Praise for Shortfall "Using family documents and her mother's memories, Echols depicts a man whose financial malfeasance foreshadowed the savings-and-loan debacle of the eighties and the stock-market crash of 2008." -- The New Yorker "[An] intimate study of a Depression-era building-and-loan failure. Echols's absorbing portrait makes Main Street the rival of Wall Street for callous corruption." -- Publishers Weekly (Starred) "[ Shortfall is] a thoughtful, thoroughly researched look at financial crises, past and present." -- Booklist "A lively and informative treatment in which one man's rise and fall opens a window onto a long-overlooked historical landscape in all its finely drawn detail." -- Kirkus Reviews Praise for Hot Stuff "In this expertly rendered, wide-ranging history of one of pop's most exciting social and musical movements, Alice Echols thoroughly recovers the moment in which disco was born and flowered." -- Ann Powers, NPR "Echols's love of music, her acumen about popular culture, and her gifts as a leading cultural historian come together in this remarkable book. Fascinating, carried along by prose that is as sleek and slinky as its subject.

" -- Christine Stansell, University of Chicago "Engrossing . scholarly but fun." -- The New York Times "Echols aims for--and thoroughly achieves--a range of higher cultural insights. Revelatory." -- Publishers Weekly Praise for Scars of Sweet Paradise "Written with cinematic flair, Scars of Sweet Paradise takes us on a poetic wild ride where we confront Joplin's demons, her dreams, and her pains. In the process we discover a passageway into the social and cultural history of an entire generation." -- Robin D.G.

Kelley, UCLA "Stunningly original and evocative. No previous writer has identified Joplin's achievements as successfully as Echols does in this book." -- George Lipsitz, University of California, Santa Barbara Praise for Shaky Ground "Alice Echols is that rarest of breeds: a great historian and a great writer. She captures, as no one else has, the dizzyingly absurd complexity of American culture and cultural politics in our times." -- David Nasaw, author of The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst "Alice Echols makes brilliant, fresh, original sense of the contradictory Sixties--the music, the politics, the people. No one has done more to place the era in context--its own and ours." -- Katha Pollitt, The Nation.