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| Author: Sheila Weller
Publisher: Atria
Category: Book
List Price: $27.95
Buy New: $14.59
You Save: $13.36 (48%)
New (46) Used (14) from $14.59
Avg. Customer Rating:  117 reviews
Sales Rank: 1830
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 592
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.9
Dimensions (in): 9.7 x 6.2 x 2
ISBN: 0743491475
Dewey Decimal Number: 782.421640922
EAN: 9780743491471
ASIN: 0743491475
Publication Date: April 8, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Brand new item. Over 3.5 million customers served. Order now. Selling online since 1995. Order with confidence. Code: B20081115221554T
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| Customer Reviews:
 Too too much September 14, 2008
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
I am so happy I never bought this book, but rather, got it from my library.
I was so looking forward to reading it also.
This book is way too long and way too detailed.
If you love 1/2 page footnotes on every person that ever came into contact with each woman, this book is for you.
I understand the need for a bit of history of course, but she just totally overdoes it. She could have spared us all an easy 150 pages by eliminating a ton of noisy, unimportant information and facts that did nothing to make the story better by a long shot.
I loved her book on the Nicole Brown Simpson murder called Raging Heart, though. THAT was a great read.
Author doesn't match her subjects for gift of the written word September 14, 2008
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
I just finished the introduction, which is 28 pages long, and was greatly frustrated. For the most part, the author refers to various songs written by the songwriters without stating the titles. I would have appreciated knowing what she was talking about so I could give the songs a listen, but no luck. Even when she alluded to You're So Vain by Carly Simon, she didn't mention the title; I just happened to be able to read between the lines and figure it out. Weller may have done considerable research for this book, but, hey, if we don't need her to say which songs she's referring to, why do we need her book? What a shame - I was looking forward to reading this. Maybe it will get better.
 These Girls ARE us and they reflect us back to us... September 14, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
It's a "woman's" book...and yet it is a book music fans of the 60's will love. In addition to the women in the title there's lots about greats like: Graham Nash, Joan Baez, Neil Young, Cass Elliot, David Crosby, Bob Dylan...
If, like me, you too are a child of the sixties - a bit of a flower-child, a "folkie" or fan of any of these iconic singers you'll LOVE it!
In the 60's while I was hanging out in the coffee houses of Greenwhich Village, Joni was braking into the folk music business in Canada.
In 1965 Joni Mitchell lost her only to adoption. Like millions of us did during that era, I too lost mine in 1968. I knew we had this in common since the first time I heard "Little Green" which the book confirms was written for the daughter she named Kelly.
Like Joni, I placed my daughter in foster care. Like Joni, one man fathered my child and I hoped another would save me and rescue my child from adoption. I was married to the first one, she married the second.
It was what "we did" in the sixties.
Like me, she went it alone - no maternity home and no parents' help.
Like me - and millions of us - she suffred pain and grief...but no shame! She "saw" her daughter in the faces of every young girl. And she penned more than just "Green" about it all.
Bravo to Weller for so poignantly and sentivitly telling this very personal and painful part of Jonie's life, as well as filling us in on the her daughter's life with an adoptive family - who kept her adoption a secret - and with whom she didn't match and their reunion.
[...]
BRILLIANT IDEA, RIVETING BOOK! September 11, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Everything you've ever wanted to know about three of the most fascinating women of our times. Sheila Weller has reinvented women's history with this juicy, riveting look inside the lives of the stars of our youth and beyond. I loved reading about Carole, Joni, and Carly -- what drove them then, what keeps them excited, why they became the galvanizing people they are. And I thought Sheila Weller's writing style and insights were brilliant. This is not only a page-turner full of the best kind of celebrity gossip; it's an important book about women's place in our cultural world.
 It didn't have a good beat and I couldn't really dance to it September 10, 2008
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
I have never seen writing quite like this. Others have mentioned the mile-long sentences, the paranthetical digressions that rip apart sentences and paragraphs on almost every page and the general herky-jerky nature of the narrative. All true. But what really got to me were the author's strange use of strange new adverbs ("pioneeringly," "karmically," "welcomely," etc.) and the overuse of hyphenated composite adjectives. Surprisedly, I began keeping a list of these in-contemprary-American-English-unfound expressions. For some this might seem like nit-picking, but I don't think I've ever read a book in which the writing itself intruded so much on my experience of reading. By the time I was reading about "mountain-life-idled Carol," I was beginning to feel like "Weller-writing-addled" Daniel!
But it wasn't just the writing. Others have pointed out the excessive attention paid to who was sleeping with whom, and the fact that the author did not interview two of the main subjects of the book. The latter really is a problem and at times the book reads like a series of short biographies of people you have never heard of who had some passing acquaintance with one of the three subjects. In general, there is a lot of irrelevant information and I thought the author had an unfortunate tendency to name-drop. For example, in a book about these three women, you would expect to see attention paid to James Taylor. But why do we need to know that some other girlfriend of Taylor later went on to date Woody Allen and other celebrities? Who cares? Likewise, it seems like everyone mentioned in the book who went to Harvard - no matter how fleeting the reference or how irrelevant to the context - is identified as "Harvard educated." Now, I know there is a class and priviledge argument being made about Carly Simon, but who cares if the bass player who intruduced Carol King to some musician or other went to Harvard? You have the feeling that the first questions in every interview were: "What celebrities have you slept with?" and "Did you go to an Ivy League school?"
More fundamentally, though, the premise of the book is a little forced. The women are very different artists. Joni Mitchell was never a Top 40 hit-maker like Carly Simon and early-70's Carol King. When those two women were riding high on the charts, Mitchell was already artsy counter-culture by comparison. And the author does very little to explore her significance in popular music, relying instead on period reviews and cliches about Mitchell's career. A more interesting group of subjects would perhaps have been Laura Nyro, Mitchell and Rickie Lee Jones. But then the whole sex-partner overlap story would have been out the window.
For readers born after 1980, the book might make some interesting connections between pop music and wider cultural history. Otherwise, though, the cultural history here is pretty superficial. The 50s folk scene was dominated by men. Well, sure. The sexual revolution was a mixed blessing for women. Yep, read about that too.
Still, I read the book from beginning to end and was never seriously tempted to put it down. (If I hadn't been reading it on my Kindle, though, I would have thrown it across the room a few times!) Once I decided to take absolutely everything in it with a grain of salt, I just let it happen. My main interest was in Joni Mitchell and I think the treatment of her work was probably the weakest in the book. But I found the discussion of Carol King's environmental activism in Idaho surprising and quite interesting.
So, I cannot recommend that you not read it, but you should go into it with your eyes open.
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