A coffeetable-sized volume looking back through the entire career of Canada's iconic rock trio. (Well, their entire career through 2013, when this updated edition was published, but, of course, that does pretty much cover it.) It goes over Rush's output album-by-album and tour-by-tour, and features photos of the band from across the years and of lots of Rush memorabilia from the author's collection. It also features a short review of every album from a variety of rock critics, which were kind of interesting to read even when their opinions were very wrong. The text includes a lot of quotes from band members and other relevant people, mostly, I think, taken from interviews made during the time periods under discussion.

As a history of the band, it's far too slight to be quite satisfying, but it is a nice, pleasant walk down memory lane for Rush fans. My one big complaint about it involves a design choice: the text is printed somewhat lightly against a background patterned with faint images, and it's genuinely a bit difficult to read in anything but ideal lighting conditions. I'm willing to forgive it a lot, though, because, in the final pages, it alerted me to the existence of a remixed version of Vapor Trails, which I'd somehow utterly missed -- I know, I know, I'm clearly a Fake Rush Fan -- and had been grumpily longing for for years when I could have already had it in my hot little ears.

Rating: I was kind of set to give this a slightly stingy 3.5/5, not for any great reason, just for being a bit physically hard to read and not as in-depth as I might have liked, but the Vapor Trails thing has put me in such a good mood, I'm giving it a 4/5 instead. Hey, nobody ever said my ratings couldn't be idiosyncratic and arbitrary! ( )