Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #54519 in Books
• Published on: 2008-04-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 592 pages

Review
" 'A carousel ride of a memoir, complete with ups and downs, prize brass rings and grim silence, when the music stops... But as interesting as anecdotes of stars and wheeler-dealers can be, and as evocative as the book is of an era of cigarette girls, the real story occurs within the family... The last pages are shattering... a heartbreaking account of a badly broken family.' - New York Times Book Review 'Weller manages to turn a family chronicle of winsome glamour and almost Shakespearean tragedy into a scorching intellectual exercise... Dancing at Ciro's bursts the bounds of the Hollwood memoir genre... This chronicle of glamour, rage, sorry and hostory... At once deeply indiosyncratic and reasonably universal, Dancing at Ciro's is a very important, very disturbing book.' - Washington Post"

Half collective biography, half music-industry dish about three singer-songwriters who represented a generation of women on "a course of self-discovery, change, and unhappy confrontation with the limits of change."Vanity Fair and Glamour contributor Weller (Dancing at Ciro's: A Family's Love, Loss, and Scandal on the Sunset Strip, 2003, etc.) doesn't veer from the traditional image of her subjects. Carole King is the Brill Building tunesmith whose vinyl warmth reflected earth-mother instincts; Joni Mitchell, the Canadian prairie-born poet/artist whose yearning for love and commitment conflicted with the need for freedom (and its concomitant loneliness) that fueled her greatest songs; and Carly Simon, the neurotic, alarmingly candid and sexy Manhattan chanteuse. The author has pored over numerous documents concerning these three and interviewed scores of current or former lovers, friends, colleagues and relatives. Reflecting this prodigious legwork, many pages are crammed with the longest parentheses this side of Faulkner. Weller's prose frequently falls into cliche (Mitchell's "exorcising of demons"), and although she dutifully proclaims her subjects' stories to be tales of feminine empowerment, she more often sounds like Gossip Girl. The narrative frequently becomes a roundelay of ecstasy, insensitivity, drugs, madness, betrayal and loss at the hands of the men that got away, including James Taylor, Crosby, Stills & Nash, Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson, Jackson Browne, Leonard Cohen and Gerry Goffin (King's first husband and collaborator). Weller neglects the musicianship behind some of the memorable songs of the last half-century: You'd never know, for instance, that Mitchell's open style of tuning landed her on a Rolling Stone list of the 100 greatest guitarists in rock history. Yet the author's research has unearthed so much little-known material (including King's "Rick One/Rick Two period": successive marriages to Idaho mountain men) that her account is essential for understanding how three female superstars survived male chauvinism, romantic disaster and late-career neglect by the music industry to become icons.Definitely a guilty pleasure, but still a solid contribution to the story of 20th-century popular music. (Kirkus Reviews)

The Observer
`Eminently readable'

Caitlin Moran, The Times, Saturday 3rd May 2008
This is a fabulous book...Girls Like Us unfolds with drama and panoramic detail.

Customer Reviews

I loved this book!
I'm a woman of the 60's and it all rang true. I think we all wanted to be these three women when we were younger, and the stories behind the music, plus the real-life tales of each woman's challanges to free herself from stiffling conventions kept me reading it straight through. The evocation of each woman's personality and her particular challenges was keen - I felt I knew them by the time the book was finished (and could so relate to so much of what they went through). You also got a chance to revisit the times ....How I had forgotten so many details: What we wore, what concerned us, how small a space a young woman had to move around in, how much she had to do on her own. These women's music expressed the exhilleration and the pain of charting a new course, and by the end of the book I wanted to hug them (and listen to their magnificent albums all over -- and over -- again)

Girls Like Us
Save your money for the CDs. That is my advise. This author is so busy putting comments in brackets and hyphens that the story is very hard to follow. There are copious amounts of names that seem unimportant here and detract from the tale. I will listen to the music instead. A big disappointment to this 'child of the sixties'.

A powerful and moving rendering of a hugely important moment in the history of feminism
I thoroughly enjoyed this book. Having been a young woman in the '70s and a child in the '60's this graphic account of the developments in the '60's filled in the gaps for me. The three singer/songwriters are described with warmth, generosity and a clarity that captured my imagination and sent me back to their music, I closed the book with a huge respect for their ground breaking work, something I'd previously taken for granted. I think that Sheila Weller has done a brilliant job processing the information she had and analysing it in terms of the period. The only weakness is in some of the writing which descends into the style of a rather unskilled rock journalist. However, this is not always the case and at many points the writing is clear and unpretentious. This book is worth reading for anyone interested in why we, as women, are where we are today and have the freedoms we do.