It's not actually about the record Smile, though that's in there. It's a breathtakingly lucid, coherent and sober examination of The Beach Boys and their music and why you might want to listen to it.

Usually the story people like to tell about The Beach Boys is something akin to Oscar Wilde's "The Nightingale and the Rose" with Brian Wilson in the role of the nightingale. Without diminishing in any way what Wilson accomplished, Sanchez refuses to be seduced by the fairy tale elements of the story.

Slender though this book is, at just over a hundred pages, it gets incredible mileage. When you finish it you will, I hope, have a healthy skepticism of other tellings of the story as well as a revitalized appreciation for American pop music and pop culture.

The first line is "It was meant to be funny".