Robert Dimery

Thanks to Netgalley and Laurence King Publishing for providing a free copy in exchange for an honest review.

I definitely consider myself an avid David Bowie fan, having dived down the rabbit hole of his work after watching the (much maligned) Glass Spider Tour on television in my teens. I loved it, but I loved Bowie even more as I stepped backwards through the eighties, seventies and sixties coming to rest at my favourite Bowie album Space Oddity. I am thus also highly cognisant of the fact that I'm writing this review on the 5th anniversary of Bowie's death in 2016. This is a short book on the life and works (music, films and plays) of Bowie, with a generous proportion of the book dedicated to his golden years, say the first fifteen years of his career. This is clearly also the part of Bowie's oeuvre that the author has the most appreciation for and the book book takes a riveting ride through Bowie's long musical career. I've not read a lot about David Bowie so far (although I occasionally leaf through Nicholas Pegg's "the Complete David Bowie" to get a more thorough appreciation of the meaning of his lyrics). I was pleasantly surprised by the abundance of information on the first phase of Bowie's career. Dimery is clearly less enamoured by the more commercial phase that Bowie went through in the eighties and even the many experiments that Bowie was able to pursue in the nineties. This is a book which can easily be doubled to 300 pages to further explore the last thirty years of his life more thoroughly. As I finished the book, his songs continued playing in my head, and I was left wanting for more. So now to play David Bowie's "My Death"...… (més)

David Bowie from Robert Dimery is part of the Lives of the Musicians series, intended to be short but concise biographies of important musicians. Within that context, this book works very well.

If you come to this expecting new and as yet unpublished information, you obviously didn't read what the book was written to accomplish. Not to mention it makes no sense for you to think a short 144 page (body of the book) volume is an in depth groundbreaking work. The issue is not with the book but with the faux outrage of those wanting to display their pseudo credentials as "true" Bowie fans. Save it.

This volume is a very good general biography. It covers his entire life as well as his music. And no, the latter part of the book is not just music reviews, but reading comprehension is a weak point for many, so... If you know nothing about Bowie other than some of his music, this is a great introduction. Even if you have read most of the books about him, as I and many other people have, this is still a nice quick overview that lets you spend a few hours reliving his life.

I would recommend this to readers who want a short biography of the person to go along with their love of his music. I would also recommend this to those who may well have read many of the critical books about his music or his life but like to have a nice quick read that covers everything without getting into every little piece of minutiae. I might refrain from recommending this to those who are more interested in showing how much they (think) they know, after all, they already know everything.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.… (més)