I’m a student of biography. Artists, musicians, and comedians are what I read about. I crave to know what makes a great artist tick, how their ideas develop, and why they choose to pursue their craft at huge personal expense. I’m motivated to write more of my own. These biographies are informative, entertaining, and engaging reads, well worth your time. It’s a challenging and frustrating process to tell an artist’s story. Yet their roots, their influences, and how they shake up popular culture make for greater insight into our humanity. Artists take risks and I’m always impressed by the boldness of their vision.
I wrote
Outside Looking In: The Seriously Funny Life and Work of George Carlin
Interested in learning more about the life and times of Mort Sahl? Then look no further! Curtis does a remarkable job of putting Sahl’s life and work into historical context, a key to understanding the evolution of stand-up comedy after 1950. The story of Sahl is the story of every comedian who wanted to speak truth to power in a funny way. Sahl shaped the style of George Carlin, Woody Allen, and David Steinberg. Curtis pays tribute to the comedian and the artistic legacy he left us. It was an important resource for my study of George Carlin.
On December 22, 1953, Mort Sahl (b. 1927) took the stage at San Francisco's hungry i and changed comedy forever. Before him, standup was about everything but hard news and politics. In his wake, a new generation of smart comics emerged-Shelley Berman, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Lenny Bruce, Bob Newhart, Dick Gregory, Woody Allen, and the Smothers Brothers. He opened up jazz-inflected satire to a loose network of clubs, cut the first modern comedy album, and appeared on the cover of Time surrounded by caricatures of some of his frequent targets such as Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Adlai Stevenson,…
Jon Stewart once proclaimed that Richard Pryor, Lenny Bruce, and George Carlin were the “Holy Trinity” of stand-up comedy. After reading Scott Saul’s first-rate biography of Richard Pryor, I was transformed by the detailed writing and Saul’s portrait of an artist who struggled to find his voice. Saul’s premise was not to write a full biography but to examine the life and times of Pryor from his birth to his mid-life successes in 1980. I could not have written a book about George Carlin, Pryor’s contemporary, without Saul’s deeply researched tome. It’s a great read.
A major biography-intimate, gripping, revelatory-of an artist who revolutionized American comedy. Richard Pryor may have been the most unlikely star in Hollywood history. Raised in his family's brothels, he grew up an outsider to privilege. He took to the stage, originally, to escape the hard-bitten realities of his childhood, but later came to a reverberating discovery: that by plunging into the depths of his experience, he could make stand-up comedy as exhilarating and harrowing as the life he'd known. He brought that trembling vitality to Hollywood, where his movie career-Blazing Saddles, the buddy comedies with Gene Wilder, Blue Collar-flowed directly…
I love to read biographies that are detailed, critical, and smart. Considering the number of biographies available about music legend Hank Williams, Ribowsky’s informative style and sensible writing strips away the veil of myth and gets down to contextual facts. His biography of Williams tells the story most people already know, yet he creates a fresh, vibrant tale of a truly great musician, troubled by poor health, an oppressive mother, and a drinking problem that took him to the edge. Ribowsky puts all of Williams’s quirks into perspective by writing a well-rounded and empathetic biography that leaves all others in the dust.
After he died in the back seat of a Cadillac at the age of twenty-nine, Hank Williams-a frail, flawed man who had become country music's first real star-instantly morphed into its first tragic martyr. Having hit the heights with simple songs of despair, depression and tainted love, he would become in death a template for the rock generation to follow.
Mark Ribowsky weaves together the first fully realised biography of Williams in a generation. Examining his music while re-creating days and nights choked in booze and desperation, he traces the rise of this legend-from the dirt roads of Alabama to…
In this thorough biography of The Beatles, Lewisohn grabbed my attention from the first sentence, “Every once in a while, life conjures up the genuine ultimate.” For the next 800-plus pages, Lewisohn charts the story of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr with a flourish of page-turning insights, evaluations, and cultural history. I’ve written two biographies on two artists. Lewisohn, who is the defacto Beatles historian, has written the story of four men and not let his love of the band and their music get in the way of sober, constructive criticism. It wasn’t all love and rockets for the band. They worked their butts off, risking their health and their personal relationships to pursue their musical goals. I look forward to Volume 2 and 3.
Now in paperback, Tune In is the New York Times bestseller by the world’s leading Beatles authority – the first volume in a groundbreaking trilogy about the band that revolutionized music.
The Beatles have been in our lives for half a century and surely always will be. Still, somehow, their music excites, their influence resonates, their fame sustains. New generations find and love them, and while many other great artists come and go, the Beatles are beyond eclipse.
So . . . who really were these people, and just how did it all happen?
One of the most misunderstood artists of the last century has to be Yoko Ono. Donald Brackett, whose written biographies of Amy Winehouse, Tina Turner, and Sharon Jones, has done an excellent job of telling Ono’s story, going way beyond the standard, reductive tales about Ono and her relationship with John Lennon. His book traces Ono’s roots in Japan, her early works of performance art, and her time in New York in the Fifties mixing with the city’s art scene in Soho. Brackett’s love and respect for Ono’s artistic achievements shines throughout its pages.
For more than sixty years, Yoko Ono has fascinated us as one of the world’s most innovative, radical artists. From a childhood of both extraordinary privilege and extreme deprivation in war-time Japan, she adopted an outsider’s persona and moved to America where, after a spell at Sarah Lawrence College, she made a place for herself in bohemian arts circles. She was already twice divorced and established as a performance artist in the Fluxus movement and in Tokyo’s avant-garde scene before her fortuitous meeting with the Beatles’ John Lennon at a London Gallery in 1966.
John Corcelli, author of Frank Zappa FAQ, takes a deep dive into the comedic artistry of George Carlin, one of America's most important funny men. From his early radio days to his most successful comedy albums, Carlin changed the way stand-up comedy was written and performed. He was the king of all media: print, recordings, movies, television, and the fourteen quintessential HBO Specials that still resonate with fans.
I’m an OB/GYN, passionate about adventuring beyond what’s expected. This has led me to pivot multiple times in my career, now focusing on writing. I’ve written a play, The Post-Roe Monologues, to elevate women’s stories. I cherish the curiosity that drives outer and inner exploration, and I love memoirs that skillfully weave the two. The books on this list feature extraordinary women who took risks, left comfort and safety, and battled vulnerability to step into the unknown. These authors moved beyond the stories they’d believed about themselves–or that others told about them. They invite you to think about living fuller and bigger lives.
Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.
The team attempts a new route up the East Face without the use of supplemental oxygen, Sherpa support, or chance for rescue. When three climbers disappear during their summit attempt, Zieman reaches the knife edge of her limits and digs deeply to fight for the climbers’ lives and to find her voice.
The plan was outrageous: A small team of four climbers would attempt a new route on the East Face of Mt. Everest, considered the most remote and dangerous side of the mountain, which had only been successfully climbed once before. Unlike the first large team, Mimi Zieman and her team would climb without using supplemental oxygen or porter support. While the unpredictable weather and high altitude of 29,035 feet make climbing Everest perilous in any condition, attempting a new route, with no idea of what obstacles lay ahead, was especially audacious. Team members were expected to push themselves to their…
