Martin Popoff is pretty up front about the difficulty of writing a book about Australia's favorite sons of school-boy-clad hard boogieing. The Young family is apparently notoriously private, so little is known about Angus and Malcolm aside from the big events that make big news, such as Malcolm's struggle with dementia and eventual death in 2017. This must have made fulfilling the assignment of writing AC/DC at 50 (and Popoff is also up front about the fact that he was assigned this project) a challenge. Motorbooks' (Fill in the Blank) at 50 books are illustrated histories dominated by photos of the featured artist and related memorabilia, and they tend to come in under 200 pages, so they aren't exactly text heavy. Still, how do you write a book of even that length about a clan as tight-lipped as AC/DC?Popoff mostly deals with this problem by focusing on their albums, but since AC/DC's output is so samey (wonderfully, ass-kickingly samey, of course), it's also hard to critique their work on an album-by-album basis. Fortunately, Popoff is an appealing writer, with a casual, conversational tone that makes all of his books very readable, whether he's telling a juicy story, like that of Rush, or a drier one, as he does in AC/DC at 50. Descriptions of the band's appearances at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, SNL, or the Grammys do feel like straight-up filler, but an abundance of electrifying photos of Angus Young glowering under his school-boy cap kind of make up for that.
