...with this meticulously reported microhistory, Hale, who once played in a band and ran an underground club in Athens, delivers more than a love song to the music. Cool Town also serves up a textured portrait of a generation caught between baby and tech booms, wriggling under the thumb of the mainstream.

... you are in for a wild ride with Cool Town, Grace Elizabeth Hale’s hybrid ethnography-memoir. And even if Pylon and Love Tractor are old hat to you, Cool Town is still going to teach you a whole lot.

... it’s hard to deny that the Athens Effect was of unusual proportions.

Grace Elizabeth Hale's Cool Town is one of those books with a subtitle that sounds like an oversell: How Athens, Georgia Launched Alternative Music and Changed American Culture. Hale has the receipts, though.

... historian Grace Elizabeth Hale makes the case that without the small Southern college town, there would be no grungy Seattle, no hipster Williamsburg, no weird Austin.

... an insider’s perspective, but with the thorough research typical of her profession. The result is less a music or history book than a work of cultural anthropology in which Hale, rather than celebrate and catalog Athens music, contextualizes the music as the most visible product of a culture both experimental and insular, and of a community that nurtured its artists.

Both a historian and a participant in the music scene, Hale crafts a lively account of 1980s Athens: the artists, their stories, and the haunts they frequented, such as the Grit and the 40 Watt Club.

This entertaining history takes a nostalgic look at the 1970s and ’80s indie music mecca of Athens, Ga.

A carefully constructed history of how Athens, Georgia, became a cultural hot spot.