A rave review in the Washington Post!
I expected poet-essayist Garrett Hongo’s “The Perfect Sound: A Memoir in Stereo” to recount the author’s obsession with finding and building the ideal listening equipment. But it turns out you don’t have to be a nerdy audiophile to completely love this volume. “The Perfect Sound” contains multitudes. The book is dedicated to the author’s father — Albert Kazuyoshi Hongo — who died more than 35 years ago, when his son was 32. Garrett Hongo came of age in the 1960s and has warm memories of helping his tinkerer father build amplifiers, which then filled the family room with “big band sounds and Hawaiian hotel music.”