A jukebox musical of a book … If Altamont marked the premature end of the 1960s, Hollywood Eden is the decade’s origin story, capturing the lingering 1950s and the transition in Southern California music from surfing and hot rods to the singer-songwriters of the canyons.
San Francisco Chronicle
For a tale of dreams, there’s a lot of hustle going on in Hollywood Eden … For every sonic visionary, be it [Brian] Wilson or Phil Spector, there are a dozen people scraping by … What Selvin does so well is focus on a specific community and what made it work … Selvin took a similar approach in his ’60s Bay Area pop book, Summer of Love. Here he zooms in tighter on less trodden ground, with more revelatory results.
Los Angles Times
Selvin tells this inside story as if he were right there … Hollywood Eden is a lively and well-researched book.
Winnipeg Free Press
Forget the subtitle, which is its own myth. The book is in stray facts no one else would dig up, yet alone think of publishing … and, in this ten-years-on-the-strip tale of white people coming out of University High in Los Angeles and making records, the way Selvin can cut right down to what really matters, over and over again.
Greil Marcus, Los Angeles Review of Books
My life back in those days was truly ‘fun fun fun’ and Hollywood Eden beautifully captures our Fifties and Sixties California music scene. Please don’t change a word!
Bruce Johnston of the Beach Boys
There’s a panoramic sweep to Joel Selvin’s Hollywood Eden. It’s a story told not as a history, but as a dramatic tale, an adventure, with scenes described so vividly, they become cinematic.
Rock & Roll Globe
Hollywood Eden doesn’t shy away from the darkness that often boiled under the sun-flecked harmonies, but it ultimately celebrates these audacious young people and the enduring art they created … Hollywood Eden is a vivid and engaging snapshot of California in the 1960s — both the harsh reality and the fantasy world of song.
The Second Disc
Behind the scenes it wasn’t always fun, fun, fun, but fans of late ’50s and ’60s pop will feel like they’ve caught the perfect wave.
School Library Journal
Selvin’s style and his arrangement of biographies, incidents, random meetings with immense consequences in the microcosm of Greater L.A. make it hard to put the title down, as it reads like an action-packed movie script.
Pop Culture Shelf
