“From his first soundscape of ocean surf in Oʻahu to Rabelais’s fantastical sea of frozen words, from cicada to Aeolian harp, from La Bohème at La Scala to the Heart Sutra at a Kyoto temple, Garrett Hongo ingeniously mixes personal memoir with cultural history and offers us an indispensable guide for the search of acoustic truth.”
Yunte Huang, author of Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History
"Garrett Hongo is among writers who believe you can save everything, everyone—if only their music put into written words. Obsessively building and rebuilding audio machines, he recovers his Hawaiian childhood, his gone family, and the ancestors. The Perfect Sound is an enlightening read."
Maxine Hong Kingston, author of The Woman Warrior
“Garrett Hongo is a master, but be advised: this memoir will have you spending hundreds of dollars on audio devices, and hours of delight and even awe as you read. It is not all about stereos—it is an aria of living, hearing, feeling, writing.”
Luis Alberto Urrea, author of The House of Broken Angels
“Picking up where he left off in Volcano, Hongo shifts the focus in this new memoir from Hawaii to the wide-ranging soundtrack of his long life, well lived on three continents. His clean, poetic prose and dry sense of humor about his quest for the hypermaximal gear to hear it all anew are two of this book’s many pleasures.” – James McManus, author of Positively Fifth Street
“‘Exuberance is beauty,’ says William Blake, and this is a truly exuberant book: exuberant about music, about language, about life. Read and drink in its spirit!”
– Mark Edmundson, author of The Fine Wisdom and Perfect Teachings of the Kings of Rock and Roll
“Soulful . . . [A] paean to the power of music.” — Publishers Weekly
“Music throbs in the background throughout this spirited memoir” — Kirkus Reviews
