It is no secret to musicians trying to play New Orleans jazz for a living that jazz writers have agendas, and that what passes for worthy in the jazz media often has little to do with the music. This fine book is for these souls, and for anyone with an interest in New Orleans music history. Raeburn, a drummer, Curator of the Hogan Jazz Archive, and the son of a famous big band leader, knows as much about New Orleans music—from Gottschalk to bounce—as anyone alive. In New Orleans Style and the Writing of American Jazz History, he traces an arc from the swing era, when the first purists started pining for “authentic” jazz, through the trad jazz vs. bebop wars up through Preservation Hall and Wynton Marsalis. This “history of jazz history” fills in a lot of the cracks for those of us who haven’t lived here our whole lives. The motives behind men who wrote about jazz in the 1940s continue to have repercussions for musicians today.