Rock and Hard Places: Travels to Backstages, Frontlines and Assorted Sideshows

London-based Aussie Mueller is the kind of adventure journalist who inserts himself into nearly every story; as a rock critic, travel writer and foreign correspondent, Mueller gives equal weight to encounters with customs officials and foreign dining experiences as he does war-zone reporting in Bosnia or buddying up to the Taliban in Afghanistan. In this collection of 28 pieces penned for non-U.S. periodicals, dating from the early 1990s on, Mueller showcases his broad range-everything from The Prodigy in Beirut to Bruce Springsteen in Middle America, from revisiting Chernobyl to his own book tour of Britain. While Mueller's snarky style (think a clean-mouthed Matt Taibbi) tends to marginalize nearly everything his sources say, he pens new introductions to each piece that are at least candid about his shortcomings: he admits that he was ""trying rather too hard"" to insult L.A. in a 1991 story about Courtney Love, and apologizes to residents of Fredericton, New Brunswick, ""for the fusillade of cheap shots taken at their town"" in a 1995 piece about Green Day's Canadian tour. Mueller's best stories are the ones in which he stays on topic, including pieces on Woodstock II, The Hold Steady and the Drive-By Truckers.