Tim Brookes' self-described "subjective and selective history of the guitar in the United States" blends history, theoretical musings and the author's experience watching the custom acoustic guitar he has ordered slowly and miraculously take sound and shape.

	"GUITAR: AN AMERICAN LIFE" By Tim Brookes Grove Press ($24)

Brookes, a contributor to National Public Radio, alternates his focus in successive chapters, either describing the intricate craftsmanship of Vermont luthier Rick Davis or offering anecdotes about guitars and their players from colonial times till today.

In his breezy style, he ranges far and wide through books, old newspapers and his own interviews, and the result will probably surprise any reader with some little-known facts.

Even though I'm a longtime guitarist, I learned things about, say, the Hawaiian guitar craze of the 1920s to the '50s, the Mexican-American guitar tradition and early female rockers like Bonnie Buckingham and Alis Lesley.

Plus, I gained some insight into how an instrument is built, from picking the wood to fashioning the internal bracing to the arcane mysteries of glue and varnish.

As for the history, Brookes is less interested in names, dates and places than he is in teasing out the nuances of how the guitar sits in the lap of everyday Americana. Miners, migrant workers and prisoners populate his pages, as well as a sample of pros whose music reverberated through the popular imagination.

Even on its own terms, though, this book feels a little scattered and thin. It's marred by typos and misspellings; for instance, the Portuguese word for an acoustic guitar is violao, not viola as the author has it. There is no index, which, since this is a "sort-of" history, would have made sense.

And being selective is one thing, but in his discussion of Brazilian guitar, he mentions only Laurindo Almeida and, briefly, Bola Sete and the Assad family. Joao Gilberto, a world-renowned artist who more or less invented the bossa nova guitar style and even had an impact on American pop culture, is nowhere to be found.

And as for classical guitar, how can you forget the Romeros, not only for their talent but for the story of their escape from Franco's Spain and reinvention as an institution of the guitar's American life?

In his more theoretical comments, Brookes illuminates some of the dustier corners of guitar lore and aesthetics in smart, intuitive ways -- how even the most anti-electric "acoustic" guitarist is actually tangled up in amplification and digital effects, for example. But though he can be savvy and provocative, he can also be pedestrian and a point-misser, as when he goes on at some length about a jazz combo performing in a Miami club without seeming to "get" the nuts and bolts of what's happening.

At the book's end, the author stands in Davis' guitar workshop, reaching out to take possession of an exquisite instrument, gorgeous-looking and sounding like a dream. The reader will take away an imperfect but informative experience, nevertheless.