As the new century rapidly approaches, books attempting to encapsulate 20th-century culture have appeared with increasing frequency. Occasionally, a work like Gary Giddins' massive and wonderful Visions Of Jazz comes close to making sense of a certain slice of life, as that book did for many decades' worth of jazz progress. James Miller's Flowers In The Dustbin seems to have a similar goal. Like Giddins' book, Flowers is a chronological account of the highs and lows of a certain style of music: in Miller's case, rock 'n' roll. Also like Visions Of Jazz, Flowers is made up of short, personal essays whose subjects often demand (and, in some cases, have already inspired) books of their own. Miller's mini-essays are thoroughly researched, extremely well-written, and often informative, finding fresh details in even the most familiar of popular folklore. But that's not quite enough. For a rock historian—he was one of Rolling Stone's first writers, and he would later edit that magazine's Illustrated History Of Rock And Roll before turning his attention to less musical subjects like Michel Foucault—Miller's self-imposed scope is too limiting for a style of music that cannot be contained so easily. The thesis that rock reached its apex after about 25 years, then stopped evolving, is tough to prove, and Miller doesn't seem to have the passion for the challenge. In his honest and heartfelt preface, Miller writes that he ended his narrative in 1977 for many reasons—the death of Elvis, the arrival of punk—but mainly because rock ceased to be exciting for him. Yet is that arbitrary, subjective bookend any reason for a book like this one to end well before Madonna, Prince, postmodernism, and Nirvana? Miller's rise of rock 'n' roll comprises events that occurred while he was paying attention, which is a fair strategy for a music fan's approach, but the material he covers has been covered hundreds of times before. It's the past 20 or 25 years that have yet to be fully figured out, processed, and filed, not Elvis, Alan Freed, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and The Sex Pistols. While Miller's book features plenty of the effective, neo-romanticized academic prose favored by his pal Greil Marcus—to whom Flowers In The Dustbin is dedicated—it boasts little of the palpable excitement that courses through Visions Of Jazz (which, incidentally, leads right up to the present). Flowers is a book that, for all intents and purposes, works and works well. It's Miller's own history of rock 'n' roll, his own history of rock 'n' roll listening, but it barely acknowledges that life and music have moved on without him.