John Adams's memoir, Hallelujah Junction: Composing an American Life, published this week by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, is an "absorbing book," says the New York Times's Charles McGrath, "which at times reads like a quest narrative that travels through the whole landscape of 20th-century music." The Times writer humbly offers that "Mr. Adams writes so well that it’s a little dismaying for someone who clings to the notion that writing, like composing, is a calling developed over years, and not a hobby picked up in middle age."

As for the composing, McGrath suggests that Adams, in combining elements of both minimalism and Romantic composition, has created a "particularly American" sound. "His music is both lush and austere, grand and precise. To make an analogy to two poets whose work he has set to music, it’s Walt Whitman on the one hand and Emily Dickinson on the other."

Adams, for whom the "sincerity" of Wagner's music had a profound impact, "brings to the book the Wagnerian 'sincerity' he so admired," says McGrath, "but without Wagnerian self-importance."

One thing that McGrath finds missing in the book—"[A]s good as his prose is, you wish the book could have come wired with a soundtrack illustrating his points and sampling some of his hits."—is remedied with Hallelujah Junction: A Nonesuch Retrospective, the two-disc collection of works from throughout Adams's career, available both as a stand-alone album and also together with the book in the Nonesuch Store.

To read the full review, visit nytimes.com.