Hrajte to nahlas aneb 50 let Love Me Do – Šedo Leoš (2013)

The history of rock music from the 1950s to the 1970s in eighteen images by Leoš Šeda is a fascinating and insightful guide to the 'best of the best' that has happened in modern popular music since World War II. It is not a dry chronological overview of dates, single titles, or band line-ups; rather, the nearly five-hundred-page book opens up a view from an enthusiastic fan, intentionally subjective, as it discusses what he loved and still loves, what he listened to in recent decades, sought out at flea markets, and pursued in every possible way to gather as much information as he could about his favorites. For those of us who experienced it all with him, it is important to be reminded of records we may not have heard for a while, as well as to verify whether we missed something back then. The iPod generation thus gains a clear menu of what they should really take the time to explore and enrich their education with the beautiful music that illuminated the lives of their grandparents and parents during communism, and significantly chipped away at the Iron Curtain, because after all, the stones rolling into Prague ultimately crushed all the unwelcome tanks.