Thousand Suns

2003's Dance of Death marked the triumphant return of old-school Iron Maiden. Gone were the murky, over-produced set pieces that clogged 2000's Brave New World and in their place fell blistering slabs of Piece of Mind-era metal. That trend continues with their 14th full-length album, Matter of Life and Death, a more elaborate and meandering experience than Dance of Death, but a rewarding one for fans willing to indulge the group's occasional excess. At over 70 minutes, Matter of Life and Death is closer to 1988's woefully underrated Seventh Son of a Seventh Son than it is to Piece of Mind, but with far less keyboard tickling. Recorded live in the studio, epics like "Reincarnation of Benjamin Breeg," "Brighter Than a Thousand Suns," and the brutal "Longest Day" – the whole record is a loosely-knit song cycle with war at its core – exhume prog rock complexity and discipline yet manage to bristle with the kind of small-club intensity usually reserved for acts half their age.

In this epic, beautifully written masterwork, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson chronicles one of the great untold stories of American history: the decades-long migration of black citizens who fled the South for northern and western cities in search of a better life. From 1915 to 1970, this exodus of almost six million people changed the face of America. Wilkerson interviewed more than a thousand people, and gained access to previously untapped data and official records, to write this definitive and vividly dramatic account of how these American journeys unfolded, altering our cities, our country, and ourselves.