Reading Singing in the Age of Anxiety: Lieder Performances in New York and London Between the Wars is an immersive experience. Sandwich papers rustle at the National Gallery lunch recitals in London inaugurated in 1939 (all other concerts were on pause as blackouts blanketed the city); New York society ladiesand sometime lieder listenerssmoke, drink, play bridge, and dive into plunge pools wearing red regulation bathing suits; tears fall and Lotte Lehmann's voice cracks as she gives her 1951 farewell concert at New York's Town Hall, leaving her pianist to complete the final phrase of Schubert's 'An die Musik' alone. Lieder are sung on the radio, in luxury hotels, in concert halls, on makeshift stages, on transatlantic liners, on freight ships, by comic Hollywood tenors. Dedicated lieder recitals are a rarity. Lieder singers on the transatlantic circuitsome of whom are in political exileare often able to transition fluidly between 'high' art and more popular fare and medias (recital hall, German Christmas carols for US radio, film). Tunbridge recaptures in high definition an era of possibility for the lied, a genre marked by its closeness, its sense of authenticity, and, perhaps most important for the interwar period, its nostalgia. At the same time, she shows how live and technologically driven performance practices interacted with turbulent politics to shape how and where we expect lieder to be performed and heard today. Singing in the Age of Anxiety is thus a book about German art song, but it is also a book about a particular cultural affect. German art songsmall-scale and intimate, far from the vanguard, an unremarkable, everyday element of the existing musical landscapehardly seems an obvious medium for uncovering the grain of the interwar world. After all, historians tend to characterize eras through innovationswhat it was that was different. But by beginning with the lied, the book contours the mood of an era. Tunbridge describes it as a 'decentered' account, which, looking beyond institutions and composers, offers something more like a 'use-history' (here she invokes historian of science David Edgerton), to help think about the roles of the pre-existing technologies that remain ubiquitous in a given period (2). Keenly felt through the book is the nostalgic hankering of the interwar years for a sense of a civilization lost (one, perhaps, that never quite existed), concerns about race and class, and the fear of a future that may not contain the genteel settings, safeties, and norms associated with the spaces and comfortable subjectivities of lieder performance, given fast-moving political and technological change. 'Auch kleine Dinge können teuer sein' (11), Tunbridge reminds us, quoting