Mondo Exotica: Sounds, Visions, Obsessions of the Cocktail Generation

Wow, this book holds a lot of great detail and information for every fan of this genre of music. I can’t believe the in depth writing about a subject that I love so much. I recommend this for any fan.

I’ve been deejaying vinyl for 25 years, and I run a book club for music lovers. I’m also a librarian. I learned massive amounts from this amazing book!

I love lounge music in all its many incarnations: space age pop, exotica, spy music, crime jazz, etc. I was hoping this would be a nice companion to the two other books on the genre. Unfortunately, it only half lived up to the promise.It just gets too many facts wrong. Big ones and little ones. The author totally buys into the "myths" of Korla Pandit, Chaino and others without finding their true stories. Biographies of other artists are oddly brief.In addition, the author ignores the music scene in England, France, and South America. How can one write a book about this period of music and not mention the influence of the Brazilian Bossa Nova artists?On the other hand, it does fill in a lot of blanks in the histories of Italian film music composers and offers a very useful catalog of artists and their albums. For that, it's almost worth the money. I wish the author had done the entire book on the Italian music world.

Best info I've found yet on Sonny Lester

Francesco Adinolfi certainly knows his subject, as "Mondo Exotica" is an exhaustive musicological examination of the history and social aspects of Exotica and Lounge music. This book is not for those with only casual interest in the subject, and it can be quite a challenging read.For those of us who share Adinolfi's obsession with the cocktail generation, however, it offers a lot of pertinent information and analysis. My only complaint is that a for a genre filled with such fascinating visual components the lack of any photographs whatsoever diminishes its appeal somewhat. I would have enjoyed seeing what the Shell club and other lounges looked like as well as some reproductions of Exotica LP covers, but maybe that is an "American" thing. Anyway, you have got to appreciate the fact that Adinolfi has really done his homework and this book is probably the last word on it's unusual subject.