|
| 
| Author: Sheila Weller
Publisher: Atria
Category: Book
List Price: $27.95
Buy New: $17.10
You Save: $10.85 (39%)
New (41) Used (16) from $15.84
Avg. Customer Rating:  118 reviews
Sales Rank: 2401
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
|
| Customer Reviews:
 Well worth the read! May 19, 2008
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
A great read, well researched, lots of detail and recommended for anyone who loves the music of any or all of Carole, Joni or Carly. It is also interesting as an insight into the behaviour of the 60s and 70s, times never to be repeated.
 Mixed May 18, 2008
Don't like the writer's style much at all -- way too many footnotes, quite distracting from the story -- but the era itself is so interesting that the read rises above the writing.
Gossipy fun May 18, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon--And the Journey of a Generation
I admit I enjoyed the insider stories and history of these women, but Sheila Weller has a bad habit of using extremely long and sometimes confusing sentences. I would have enjoyed the book more if she had come straight to the point in many instances instead of larding her insights and information with unwieldy constructions. Despite this, I DID like this book.
Review from an anonymous source May 17, 2008
2 out of 4 found this review helpful
This book relies too much on anonymous sources for my taste. I can see why Seymour Hersh would need to grant anonymity to the sources of his stories about national security, but Sheila Weller seems to have granted many of her sources anonymity in order to print particularly salacious anecdotes that will make her book more marketable. Weller claims to feel "confident of the respectability of the source[s'] motive[s] for the request" for anonymity, but that doesn't do much for the reader's confidence in her. The account of Joni Mitchell's alleged suicide attempt, for example, which is described in graphic language, relies solely on anonymous "confidante[s]" of Mitchell's. If Weller couldn't persuade any one of the "several people" she interviewed to go on the record about this alleged incident, perhaps it wasn't worth setting down in print. I'm sure that Weller is convinced this incident happened, but her account of it doesn't, for this reader, rise above the level of gossip. Her account of Mitchell's pregnancy in 1964-65, on the other hand, is bolstered by the recollections of interviewees like Duke Redbird, who were willing to be named as a sources. Although Weller admirably attempts to ground her book in sociological and historical accounts of American women born in the 1940s, her frequent reliance on unnamed "friends" or "confidantes" of her subjects for material makes the book read like an article in "US" magazine. If you can read the book on that level--and indeed most readers, like me, first excerpts of it in "Vanity Fair"--then it's very enjoyable. There are some titillating, "Rashomon"-like debates between interviewees about which men particular songs by Mitchell and Carly Simon are about: which parts of Mitchell's "A Case of You" are about Leonard Cohen and which are about James Taylor? I was delighted to learn that Mitchell's "Coyote," my favorite song of hers, is about Sam Shepard--until I noticed that there's no source, named OR unnamed, for this information.
Girls Like Us May 16, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
What a joy to find a well-researched book about three famous singers I so much wanted to emulate as a young woman. This book not only chronicles three artists' lives, it captures the magic of a generation. If you lived through the 60's and 70's this is a must read. If you didn't, it serves as a an up-close and personal history lesson back to a time that influenced today's musical stylings and trends.
|
|
|
Powered by Associate-O-Matic
| |
