Like the great myths told as a multitude of variants across cultural contexts, a star who shines as brightly as Johnny Cash prompts investigations at paradoxical poles of human experience–the expanse of a phenomenon spread worldwide vis-à-vis localized, individual experiences of that phenomenon. In Johnny Cash International: How and Why Fans Love the Man in Black, Michael Hinds and Jonathan Silverman attend to this paradox: In practice, [international] Cash fandom paradoxically intensifies a sense of place. As fans respond powerfully to the imaginary geography of Cash's songs and the actual geography of his life, they also express a strong sense of relationship, if not affiliation, to their home locality. (8) Framed by these international and localized points of view, Johnny Cash International is organized into Part I, “Histories and Contexts of International Fandom,” and Part 2, “A Year in the Life of Cash Fans around the World.” In both, Hinds and Silverman present analyses of Cash's international performance records, of qualitative surveys administered to respondents from seventeen different countries, and most frequently of the bewilderingly “world-wide” spaces of the Internet. For localized views, they report–mostly in the second part of the book–on a range of personal interactions with Cash fans from several different countries, including Ireland, England, France, Portugal, Norway, Sweden, and the Netherlands. At times, these interactions amount to one-off interactions at a café or in University settings; at other times, they rise to a level of longitudinal, ethnographic study.In the Preface, we learn that Hinds, a literary scholar from Ireland, and Silverman, an American Studies scholar teaching in New England, met in Dublin City in 2010 when Silverman gave a talk about Cash's song “A Boy Named Sue” at Mater Dei Institute where Hinds was working at the time. Both, they learned, were Cash fans, and from the outset, their relationship was fruitful. A thesis formed: People across cultures are capable, willing, and often successful creators of their own version of Johnny Cash fandom (or Cashdom as the authors name it). It is a good argument to make. And when the book leans into its thesis, when the authors fully describe situated examples of personal and group agency necessary for pulling off expressive acts of fandom, Johnny Cash International shines.Chapter 1 establishes the book's range, introducing two Cash fans who become “a prologue to the work of this entire study” (14). The first is “Charlie Taggart, a shopkeeper in the Northern Irish town of Omagh, Country Tyrone, whom Hinds met in 2013 when he went to buy a newspaper” (14). We learn that Taggart always–every day–plays Cash on a cassette player in his shop. A self-conscious Johnny Cash fan, Taggart stands out among the Irish country music and traditional music fans who generally appreciate Cash but do not necessarily adore him. Taggart also stands out among other Cash superfans discussed in the book, for he is not a performer or tribute artist. He does not collect copious amounts of Cash memorabilia. Charlie Taggart's fandom presents, according to Hinds and Silverman, the kind of self-reliant fan who “does not want to be Johnny Cash, just admire him through contemplation” (19). From this introduction, Hinds and Silverman build out an intimate description of Taggart's fandom by unpacking the shopkeeper's own ideas about his reception of Cash, including Taggart's thoughts on his favorite Cash song, on the uniqueness of Cash's performative charisma, on the dualistic complexities of Cash's rambling-man, contrarian ways, and his gospel-singing, Southern-gentleman demeanor. The second “fan” amounts to little more than an anecdote about a student at a Christian school in Tomb, Norway, who approached Silverman after a lecture in order to show him the Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash tattoos on his calf. Admitting that Silverman did not think of interviewing the student at the time, the authors also admit that they can only speculate about the student's reasons for approaching Silverman. They choose the image of the student's tattooed calf to embody “the unknowingness of fan desire” which for them “has prompted this study into ensuring it hears such stories, teasing out their potential significance, both local and international” (26, 28). Thus, Hinds and Silverman recognize that their data often rests at two ends of a continuum. On one “knowable” end, the bright exemplar of ethnographic specificity that is their presentation of Charlie Taggart, and on the other “unknowable” end, the authors' relatively dim anecdotal speculation about the tattooed student from Tomb.A pattern arises that tends to characterize online Internet inflections of Cashdom as vague and requiring speculation. In Chapter 7, a discussion of YouTube videos and user comments that feature or react to Johnny Cash's music, the authors repeatedly–if indirectly–assign YouTube to the category of the unknowable. Consider these examples: “It is unclear whether this was a premeditated posting in connection with ‘Hurt,’ or whether it was something spontaneous, a reaction to a random viewing” (106); “It is not always apparent who is saying what to whom–but more to the point, who cares?” (109); and “It is hard to know who is from where except through subject clues, like saying you are ‘at university’ rather than ‘in college’” (112). It is not that Hinds and Silverman find no worth in Internet texts. Their analyses of Internet fandom can be witty and compelling, as is the case when the authors liken Internet user comments to an untrustworthy “empire of dirt” (109). And Chapter 8 presents a useful taxonomy of YouTube videos featuring international performers of Johnny Cash's music. But even specific Internet examples frequently end in speculation, as does their commentary on a homeless man in Manchester, England, who appears in several YouTube videos performing Cash songs recorded by pub goers: Homeless Paul emerged from nowhere and now lives on in these videos, but he remains otherwise unknown. Cash might be the only comfort that he has. Yet this seems grossly sentimental and patronizing. The videos show a man for whom Cash really means something…. (82–83) Whether we are concerned with Johnny Cash or any other worldwide phenomenon, Hinds and Silverman suggest that the World Wide Web cannot substitute for either extraordinarily robust cross-cultural fieldwork or a God's-eye view of the human experience. Hinds and Silverman do not solve the problems of “unknowingness” in reception studies; they choose, instead, to allow their Internet examples to demonstrate those problems.Then again, contextualized insights are knowable, and Hinds and Silverman's work deserves strong praise for discovering several Cash fans on the Internet and then working to meet them face-to-face. Chapter 9's in-person interview of Marco Rockmilhaud, the creator of “the only website in French dedicated to the championing of Johnny Cash,” leads to an excellent examination of Rockmilhaud's past experiences–with his father who was a Cash fan and as a bassist in a number of French punk bands in the 1970s–as catalysts for his online presence in the twenty-first century. Outside of Chapter 1's discussion of Charlie Taggart, the most detailed ethnographic sections of the book involve interlocutors with active Internet profiles. Most important are the concluding chapters that detail Silverman's experiences with Netherlander Elvira van Poelgeest–founder of the website Johnny Cash Info Center (www.johnny-cash-infocenter.com) and member of a country band called Black Suspenders–and Irish fan Barry Winters, whom Elvira connected with Silverman via Facebook and who, himself, was a performer in the Johnny Cash tribute band, Strictly Cash. Eventually, Elvira's virtual connections bring Silverman face-to-face with international fans during a year of fieldwork (June 2017–June 2018) in northern Europe, in the United States when two groups of those fans toured key musical and heritage sites in the American South, and finally in Ireland where Black Suspenders and Strictly Cash performed at a concert dedicated to Cash's memory at a former prison on Spike Island off Ireland's southern coast. While some of their ethnographic decisions may surprise–the most puzzling example is Chapter 11's discussion of European fan Walter Ringhofer's eight-thousand digital photographs he took while on the aforementioned American heritage tour that includes zero printed examples of those images–they do provide enough examples to support the argument that Johnny Cash fans, especially Cash's international superfans, receive Cash's music by dynamically incorporating it into their own musical performances, collection practices, tourism plans, familial histories, political stances, and more.The book concludes with a final nod to paradox, Pakistani-American Yusuf Agha's essay marking the 2003 death of the Man in Black. Agha–who first came to love Cash's music in Pakistan–draws strength from Cash's lyrics to help him speak out against Palestinian suffering: “Whether Cash himself was a supporter of Israel was beside the point, because Agha hears a fundamental expression of justice in his performance that transcends such as concern” (214). How can Johnny Cash, the kid from Arkansas, feature in such old, global problems? In their last (and most cosmological) turn, Hinds and Silverman hold out the possibility that Cash's star helps others find a place for value in a world of hard facts: “In a sense, to love Cash is to use him as a way of thinking about your own place in the world, and when thinking about the world, Cash serves as a portal to understanding what his fans value” (215).Those interested in thinking about fandom as a portal to worldview, about the online and offline interactions of Cash fans across cultures, and about the active reception of Johnny Cash's bright shining star will surely find value in Hinds and Silverman's book.