Grateful Dead Book Reviews

David Cain’s Infinite Dead October: A Daily Guide to Grateful Dead Concert Performances is a listening companion designed to lend order to the band’s sprawling live archive. The premise is simple: a day-by-day, show-by-show review of every known Grateful Dead performance that took place in the month of October.

Lindsay Rice’s debut novel Birdenwheel is a braided narrative of characters trying to outrun their inner demons. Set in the Vince-era Grateful Dead scene of the 1990s, its universe rings true, especially for readers who traveled “on tour.” But, Rice is after more than capturing the familiar icons of lot life. Her characters navigate complex family dynamics, broken promises, grief and regret, the slow erosion of failed relationships and the weight of consequences that do not e

Bill Kreutzmann’s Deal is not a historian’s chronicle of the Grateful Dead. It reads like a field recording from the drummer’s stool told by the man who held the beat. Co-written with journalist Benjy Eisen, the book is exceptionally candid, percussive and sometimes messy in a way that feels honest rather than careless.

DeadBase contains the most complete and accurate listing of Grateful Dead concerts and song lists known.

You buy an old VW microbus. While cleaning it out, you discover a Deadhead’s scrapbook—part tour diary, part time capsule, part reliquary. That’s the setup for Deadhead Forever: Property of Haze, a fictional journal presented as “found” ephemera: musings, newspaper clippings, setlists, Ticketron stubs, photos, “Dupree’s Diamond News”–style odds & ends and a hundred little scraps that stitch together a surprisingly cohesive narrative. The story is invented, but the details are