A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music books (University of Chicago Press)

An ambitiously broad tome that has as its basic objective to tell the story of the music and arts movement known as the AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians), which the author joined as a teenager in the early 70s, but soon expands to take in the social and political upheavals of the 20th century as well as the particularities of the city that spawned it all: Chicago. Spanning different eras and generations, this is a very important book.