Each year, younger generations remember less and less about the '90s. Indeed, if you're 16 years old today, you were only nine when the peaceful, prosperous, liberally artistic '90s gave way to the 21st century. For today's high schoolers, "MmmBop" is just a chapter in the history book of pop culture.Thus, in the past few years, the decade of ?Pearl Jam and Right Said Fred has become an acceptable object of nostalgia. (Witness VH1's I Love the '90s: Part Deux.) Writers like Chuck Klosterman and now Rob Sheffield, the Rolling Stone columnist and VH1 pundit, have released popular books canonizing the late '80s and early '90s music that marked formative periods in their lives. Sheffield, however, takes the music-as-personal-identity much further than most music journalists. In his book Love is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time, Sheffield takes an autobiographical path, following his childhood through the small discoveries of married life and the years of recovery after his wife's unexpected death at the age of 31.

The book is punctuated by tracklists of mix tapes that Sheffield made throughout the late '80s and the '90s. Sheffield and his late wife, music journalist Renée Crist, had tapes for all occasions: washing the dishes, taking showers, driving around their home in Charlottesville, VA. Each chapter begins with a list of songs, on which Sheffield riffs on for several pages before moving on to a new topic. This strategy suits the book well. A play-by-play of Renée's death and the subsequent emotional fallout could have grown tedious without interludes on such topics as "the death of Kurt Cobain and the birth of Zima." The Klosterman-esque pop-culture references lighten Sheffield's heartbreaking, worshipful prose in passages about Renée, (and such passages make up a large part of the book).

Sheffield makes a lot of Renée's West Virginian upbringing and wild personality, in comparison to his shy, Irish Catholic persona forged in the awkward school dances and socially stratified summer camps of his adolescence in the Boston area. Renée is presented almost as a muse to Sheffield: she the fun-loving, hair-dyeing, clothes-sewing party girl, and he the tall, silent rock dude.

But while the book is largely a love letter-slash-elegy for Renée, it makes other, important points. It was in the '90s that alternative music, ushered in by Cobain and other grunge bands, became the mainstream. In 1996, it wasn't unusual to hear Bjirk on the radio. Ten years later, the mainstream airwaves carry a narrow selection of American Idol graduates, glossy dance pop and the blandest of those two genres many claim to dislike to the exclusion of all other music: country and rap. According to Sheffield, the 1990s made up a period during which white male rock bands as well as nontraditional artists (like women and minorities) were free to experiment by releasing different sorts of music to a receptive public audience. The book thus serves as a love letter and requiem to Sheffield's beloved decade as well as his wife.