Dozens of rock 'n' roll writing anthologies exist because the young genre still inspires so much romanticism and rapidly expanding real-time mythology. No single book can capture all the stories, let alone all the different ways to tell the same story, and for this reason the history of rock still bears telling in excited strokes, both broad and specific. William McKeen, a journalism professor at the University Of Florida, gathered a diverse and impressive group of voices to fill his 650-page doorstop of a collection, Rock And Roll Is Here To Stay. McKeen intelligently selected pieces not just from the usual critics, but also by the artists themselves, and he's added excerpts from related works of fiction and film. Divided into thematically linked sections, the book opens with pieces defining rock 'n' roll (Bob Dylan's liner notes to Bringing It All Back Home, transcriptions from Martin Scorsese's The Band documentary The Last Waltz) and continuing through rock's background, the birth of the superstar, and the dawn of soul. Finally (inevitably?), McKeen covers the critics and tributes, two different approaches to putting the pieces together. As with most anthologies, the truncated efforts (small excerpts from Nick Hornby's High Fidelity, Roddy Doyle's The Commitments, and Don DeLillo's Great Jones Street) and too-brief samples (poetry from Patti Smith and a little reportage from Tom Wolfe) grow frustrating, especially when McKeen is borrowing from classic and canonized rock books by the likes of Peter Guralnick, Greil Marcus, Nick Tosches, Charlie Gillett, Jon Savage, and more. The most interesting inclusions are the documents and transcripts, like Frank Zappa's vitriolic and hilarious Senate testimony against the PMRC, Phil Spector's Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame induction speech for friend Doc Pomus, or Al Kooper and Bumps Blackwell's stories about the creation of "Like A Rolling Stone" and "Tutti Frutti," respectively. However, the familiar names in Rock And Roll Is Here To Stay indicate a kind of nostalgia at odds with the collection's contemporary title: With the exception of one piece each discussing rap, Kurt Cobain, and the Internet, Here To Stay is rooted in another time and place. There, the spirit of rock remained more mysterious, if not more relevant. The thrill of the writing comes from the fact that the book epitomizes much of what's frequently missing from modern music: excitement, wonder, a sense of mythology. Maybe in another few dozen years, a similar book will do for today's music what Here To Stay does for yesterday's. But for now, McKeen's book inadvertently implies that what once was may never be again.