Anthony Reynolds (2)

This was horrible. Where was the editor? Turgid, purple prose, misused words, alliteration so heinous that one wishes there was a stiff fine for committing it, greengrocer's apostrophes everywhere- and perhaps worst of all, the author's drunken presence at a concert at the start of a book about Mr. Cohen.

Did I finish it? No. Can I judge it anyway? Yes, indeed. I dipped and sampled throughout, just in case it improved. I would love to read a good biography of Leonard Cohen. This is most show more emphatically not it.

What can I say about this book that isn't vitriolic? Hrmmm. The photos are nice. And it wasn't written in free verse.



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Interesting, but I sense the definitive biography of LC has yet been written. As I know so little about his early life, it was useful to gather a few facts from the mashup of people's memories to give some sense of the extraordinary person I consider LC to be. Reynolds makes an effort to at least write to match his subject, but I suspect that real information has become unclear because you are never sure exactly where Reynolds has derived it from. The few time-related errors I picked up on show more made me wonder about the validity of the entire work. It is a decent enough starting point of an artist that is most certainly not "straight out of a box" and whose songwriting became a means to survival. But there are many bittersweet moments recalled, LC's infatuation with Nico comes to mind--but if anything, all you really need to know about LC is right there in his own words, for me it was more about putting them into some kind of chronological order with a time & a place. Enjoyable, but flawed. show less