This has been an extremely difficult book to write about. Not the least and certainly the most obvious of its challenges is its sheer size. For over one thousand pages, John Tilbury both chronicles the tiny details and explores the social and philosophical implications of the life and work of British composer and performer, Cornelius Cardew. Writing this book was clearly a challenge for Tilbury himself on a number of registers, a fact that he readily acknowledges in his Preface. For one, he is committed to making a comprehensive biography that gives relatively equal weight to the significant projects, products, and themes of Cardew’s life, which naturally include his unequivocal shift in focus from music-making to politics and the attendant repudiation of virtually all of his previous work in the early 1970s.