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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2782 in Books
• Published on: 2008-04-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 592 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Weller's cultural history of the titans of women in rock in the 1970s details the artistic, sexual and symbolic twists and turns of Carole King, Joni Mitchell and Carly Simon in careful, loving detail. Susan Ericksen reads like one of the girls, picking up from Weller's tone and sounding like a woman of the era, besotted with the music and with the sense of boundaries being broken and glass ceilings smashed. While Ericksen occasionally slips, pronouncing words incorrectly and stumbling over unwieldy sentences, her performance is, for the most part, very solid. Weller's book is ambitious and wide-ranging, but Ericksen keeps its story tight and engaging. An Atria hardcover (reviewed online). (May)
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From AudioFile
In three interwoven biographies, Sheila Weller chronicles the life and times of three tradition-breaking women singer-songwriters--Carole King, a Brooklyn-born earth mother; Joni Mitchell from the Canadian prairie; and Carly Simon, wealthy New Yorker, radiant, sexy, and riddled by stage fright. Narrator Susan Ericksen has a ball dishing the rock 'n' roll dirt with the girls. Ericksen lends a lovely melodic tone to the stories of these tunesmiths who became the voices of a generation of women. Her reading is controlled and intelligent. Of the women, Weller interviewed only Carly Simon personally, but the book works pretty well, weaving together magazine quotes and interviews with friends and lovers. Ericksen makes the material sound like a novel. No, three novels. S.J.H. © AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

Review
[Audio Review] In three interwoven biographies, Sheila Weller chronicles the life and times of three tradition-breaking female singer-songwriters Carole King, a Brooklyn-born earth mother; Joni Mitchell, from the Canadian prairie, delicate and plagued by guilt; and Carly Simon, wealthy New Yorker, radiant, sexy, and riddled by stage fright. Narrator Susan Ericksen has a ball dishing the rock-n -roll dirt with the girls, and so will listeners. Ericksen lends a lovely melodic tone to the stories of these tunesmiths who became the voices of a generation of women. Her reading is controlled and intelligent. Of the women, Weller interviewed only Carly Simon personally, but the book works pretty well, weaving together magazine quotes and interviews with friends and lovers. Ericksen makes the material sound like a novel. No, three novels. --AudioFile

[Audio Review] Weller's cultural history of the titans of women in rock in the 1970s details the artistic, sexual and symbolic twists and turns of Carole King, Joni Mitchell and Carly Simon in careful, loving detail. Susan Ericksen reads like one of the girls, picking up from Weller's tone and sounding like a woman of the era, besotted with the music and with the sense of boundaries being broken and glass ceilings smashed. While Ericksen occasionally slips, pronouncing words incorrectly and stumbling over unwieldy sentences, her performance is, for the most part, very solid. Weller's book is ambitious and wide-ranging, but Ericksen keeps its story tight and engaging. An Atria hardcover. (May) --Publisher's Weekly

Customer Reviews

Best Music Book of the Decade
What a fantastic book! And talk about a trip down memory lane. These are the women that I came of age with and I was so glad that I was able to re-live those times again because of Sheila's book.

Thanks so much for allowing me to return to my youth and experience its joys through your words and their music - I hope Carole, Carly & Joni realize what a wonderful gift they brought to us.

Wonderful....now, go buy their music....

Cheers

DAN

Giftee very disappointed
I sent this as a gift to a young woman of the appropriate generation who always adored the very girls like them. She was extremely disappointed and felt that the author was not at all a girl like them and didn't begin to understand either the music or the entire generation.

The Lives Behind the Lyrics
Girls like us told me about the personal lives that fueled the music of my generation's youth. I was fascinated with every page and thought how these women turned their romances and disappointments into the greatest hits of several decades. It was lively, timely and even caused me to go back and buy some cd's so I could listen to the songs that Weller wrote about. It proved the old feminist maxim of the '70's that The Personal Is Political. I would recommend this book to anyone who has loved and lost and listened to it all through music. JW