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Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon--And the Journey of a Generation
by: Sheila Weller

List Price: $27.95

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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 782.421640922
EAN: 9780743491471
ISBN: 0743491475
Label: Atria
Manufacturer: Atria
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 592
Publication Date: April 08, 2008
Publisher: Atria
Sales Rank: 2517
Studio: Atria

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Editorial Review:

Product Description:

A groundbreaking and irresistible biography of three of America's most important musical artists -- Carole King, Joni Mitchell, and Carly Simon -- charts their lives as women at a magical moment in time.

Carole King, Joni Mitchell, and Carly Simon remain among the most enduring and important women in popular music. Each woman is distinct. Carole King is the product of outer-borough, middle-class New York City; Joni Mitchell is a granddaughter of Canadian farmers; and Carly Simon is a child of the Manhattan intellectual upper crust. They collectively represent, in their lives and their songs, a great swath of American girls who came of age in the late 1960s. Their stories trace the arc of the now mythic sixties generation -- female version -- but in a bracingly specific and deeply recalled way, far from cliché. The history of the women of that generation has never been written -- until now, through their resonant lives and emblematic songs.

Filled with the voices of many dozens of these women's intimates, who are speaking in these pages for the first time, this alternating biography reads like a novel -- except it's all true, and the heroines are famous and beloved. Sheila Weller captures the character of each woman and gives a balanced portrayal enriched by a wealth of new information.

Girls Like Us is an epic treatment of midcentury women who dared to break tradition and become what none had been before them -- confessors in song, rock superstars, and adventurers of heart and soul.

Customer Reviews

Average Rating: out of 5 stars

Rating:

- Good on Details, Short on Meaning
At first glance, Sheila Weller's choice of subjects seems incongruous: Joni Mitchell is one of the transcendent talents of our time. Carole King and Carly Simon, however prolific, cannot possibly come up to that standard. But Weller is concerned with the popular zeitgeist, not comparative musicianship, and we must take her book on its own terms.

Weller writes from a feminine, not a feminist, perspective. She would probably disagree with this assessment, but her particular brand of retrospective feminism has, by now, become so mainstream as to be unexceptionable. We have all come a long way since the 60's.

Three women singer-songwriters, three different life trajectories played out against the background of the 60's. Weller's "parallel lives" succeeds as biography, but fails to extract any greater meaning. I most appreciated her obsessively detailed research; I learned a lot of factual information ... Read More

Rating:

- Bogs down due to its format
I was really in a state of ANTICIPATION, since, as a boomer, I grew up with these ladies and their music. However, by the book's midpoint, it becomes unwieldy due to combining the lives of these 3 women plus James Taylor as well as some minor players of that era. You really should read it in one sitting or weekend since there are just so many friends/lovers/albums/players to keep track of. Finally, I just read it from the middle on by each singer and skipped the tangential blend of the others. Much easier and far more lucid and rewarding. An ambitious work it should be noted.

Rating:

- Before It's Too Late
As if a Freedom of Information Act request had been fulfilled, author Sheila Weller has now revealed everything you ever wanted to know about Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon, James Taylor, David Crosby and the entire neighborhood of singer-songwriters of this genre. Her book, Girls Like Us, feels like a miraculous detailed dream of full-access to the longest rock tour of your life. You are surrounded by all the talent you could ever find in the 60s and 70s. Better still, you know everything about them: their lovers, their passions, their emotions and their struggles with artistic competition. This is an amazing book.

Ms. Weller would make an exceptional private investigator. Her book is filled with meticulous and inquisitive research leaving no stone unturned. She interviewed every personality, every friend and acquaintance and every passerby. She painted her story with the detail of a Where's Waldo? portrait. ... Read More

Rating:

- Too Disjointed, No Flow
I was SO excited to get this book and took it on vacation to have a great read. WHAT a disappointment! The book is written in sections each dealing with the three women, but worse in each section there is a flood of somewhat related information that just simply gets in the way. While it is impressive that the author knew the backstory, she didn't really need to share it with the reader. I wanted the story of these women and how their lives shaped the music world and what it meant to women. The story is probably there somewhere, it was just too much work to find it.

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