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| Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon--And the Journey of a Generation | 
 enlarge | Author: Sheila Weller
Publisher: Atria
Category: Book
List Price: $27.95
Buy New: $15.56
You Save: $12.39 (44%)
New (45) Used (23) from $13.49
Avg. Customer Rating:  119 reviews
Sales Rank: 1618
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 592
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.9
Dimensions (in): 9.7 x 6.2 x 2
ISBN: 0743491475
Dewey Decimal Number: 782.421640922
EAN: 9780743491471
ASIN: 0743491475
Publication Date: April 8, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Brand new item. Over 3.5 million customers served. Order now. Selling online since 1995. Order with confidence. Code: B20081121221340T
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| Customer Reviews:
 Just okay... April 28, 2008
8 out of 13 found this review helpful
I thought that I would love this book, but.... It is certainly well researched, but the editing leaves a lot to be desired. There is too much detail about inconsequential characters and the sentence structure is often confusing to say the least. It could have been edited down by about 100 pages and been terrific, but unfortunately, I found it tedious.
Sorry - love the ladies, did not love the book.
 Yawn..... May 8, 2008
8 out of 13 found this review helpful
I really wanted to like this book as this was my generation and music ruled our lives. Unfortunately, the book is overwritten, confusing, and at times downright boring. Enough already with the unimportant name dropping and the New York zip codes? Where was the editor?
 Lugubrious Style May 20, 2008
8 out of 12 found this review helpful
I was unable to stick with this book. I think you have to be a die-hard fan of at least one of the subjects to be willing to go all the way through this prosaic text. I am not and so ended up scanning the photographs and donating it to the public library. Not worth the price, to me.
 Stayed In Bed All Morning . . . June 17, 2008
7 out of 9 found this review helpful
. . . just to finish reading this book. It's a long one, especially when you devour each little word contained in the many footnotes, but worth every hour spent. Reading this thorough, well-researched, and respectful biography of three notorious singer-songwriters, Carole King, Joni Mitchell and Carly Simon, from their days as young, aspiring artists to current days as grandmothers, was like listening to their music for the first time again. I couldn't help but break out my vinyl, stored in a moving box in the attic.
Sheila Weller clearly spent years gathering facts, information and quotes from those closest to these icons, (and in some cases from the women themselves), and braids the three stories together to paint a historical account of modern folk/rock/pop music. She doesn't merely regurgitate already published material from music reviews and Rolling Stone articles, but instead offers similarities and differences that made this reader appreciate the subjects as individuals as well as their contributions and reflections on the women's movement in general.
A surprising ribbon running through this braid is James Taylor, who had profound yet differing relationships with all three. What also ultimately struck me about the book was how deeply interested I was at the beginning and how it merely passed the time toward the end. I think it's a direct reflection on the careers of these women: exciting, fresh, ultra-talented in the beginning. . .but in the end, it becomes a biography of ordinary--albeit ambitious--women who've led extraordinary lives while looking for love and fulfillment, and endured tremendous public scrutiny. One thing the critics in our society can't take from them is their recorded music--their true biographies--and I, for one, will listen to them sing for the rest of my life.
Very well written, very well done and I certainly recommend this book to fans of these musicians (as well as James Taylor, and others like Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young), and to those interested in the music scene as it developed and evolved through the 1960s-1980s.
Michele Cozzens is the author of It's Not Your Mother's Bridge Club
Painful July 1, 2008
7 out of 13 found this review helpful
Let me begin by giving credit where credit is due: this is a great idea for a book, and if you were going to write a book like this, I can't imagine assigning a researcher with any more zeal than Sheila Weller.
Unfortunately, the poor woman simply can not write.
Having grown up in the era described, the forced veneer of social commentary contained nothing new to me, but could be instructive for those of a more tender age. But having grown up in the era described, I can tell you that the three subjects of this book had little if any commonality in terms of either their music, or their relation to the youth/feminist cultural awakening.
I don't want to belabor the point, but Ms. Weller must understand that there is no extra credit awarded for the greatest number of parenthetical statements, unsubstantiated conclusions, or incredibly bloated sentences.
As has been stated in another review, the ultimate crime here is the absence of an editor--at least one familiar with the English language. The underlying structure of the book is all wrong; contined forced lurches between the three subjects is literary whiplash. The reader is much better off streaming together every third chapter to link the story of one of the individual singers. It is honestly difficult to believe that anyone associated with a sub-brand of Simon and Shuster really read this.
Which leads to my personal conspiracy theory. Given that Carly Simon's father was one half of that publishing house, I can imagine a conversation in which the author pitched her idea for a book on Mitchell and King to an editor who answered, "not unless you also include Richard's kid--and if you do, we'll agree to print every last thing you put in your rough draft."
And they did.
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