BuzzFlash Reviews

BUZZFLASH REVIEWS

"There were five books by my bedside when Girls Like Us arrived, but this was the book I had to keep reading. It's filled with nuggets I hadn't known about, and this generation of women is my subject! If you love the singers and the songs, you'll tear through Girls Like Us."

-- Sara Davidson, bestselling author of Loose Change: Three Women of the Sixties and Leap!: What Will We Do with the Rest of Our Lives?

"Girls Like Us is about three women whose courageous, defiant talent defined a generation. Whether you read it to rediscover that wonderfully stormy time -- the '60s and early feminist movement -- or to discover it for the first time, take it to heart. Sacrifice, hard work, and daring to dream is still the tale of girls like us."

-- Carole Radziwill, author of the New York Times bestseller What Remains: A Memoir of Fate, Friendship, and Love

The New York Times - Janet Maslin

…captivating. And it defies expectations, to the point where Ms. Weller's grand ambitions wind up fulfilled…Girls Like Us is a strong amalgam of nostalgia, feminist history, astute insight, beautiful music and irresistible gossip about the common factors in the three women's lives.

From the Publisher:

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.

From an online reviewer:

[More than 500] pages about Carole King, Joni Mitchell and Carly Simon --- and this is my candidate for "beach book of 2008" for smart boomer women?

I'm not kidding. It's that good. And that addictive.

Just read the opening section about 14-year-old Carole Klein, sitting with her friend Camille Cacciatore as they leaf through the Brooklyn phone book in search of a name. Kick...Kiel...Klip. How about King? Yeah, King. And then it was off to Camille's house, where the choice was spaghetti-and-meatballs or peppers-and-onions.

Anyone can use clips and rumor to write about the famous. Sheila Weller puts you in the room. Her methods are exhaustive journalism --- she's written six books, she's won prizes, she's the real deal --- and empathy. So the path from nowhere to immortality for King, Mitchell and Simon is an epic tale, and Weller's scope is vast --- to track "the journey of a generation." Only on the surface is this a book about music, and who makes it, and how, and why. The bigger subject, the better subject, is how women found their way in their professional and personal lives, 1960-now. So, for Weller, these stories are about "a course of self-discovery, change, and unhappy confrontation with the limits of change."

Limits?

Consider this: In 1960, H.W. Janson's "History of Art" --- the standard textbook --- cited 2,300 artists.

How many were female?

Not one.


BUZZFLASH REVIEWS