Robert Dimery

Thanks to Netgalley and Laurence King Publishing for providing a free copy in exchange for an honest review.

I definitely consider myself an avid David Bowie fan, having dived down the rabbit hole of his work after watching the (much maligned) Glass Spider Tour on television in my teens. I loved it, but I loved Bowie even more as I stepped backwards through the eighties, seventies and sixties coming to rest at my favourite Bowie album Space Oddity. I am thus also highly cognisant of the fact that I'm writing this review on the 5th anniversary of Bowie's death in 2016. This is a short book on the life and works (music, films and plays) of Bowie, with a generous proportion of the book dedicated to his golden years, say the first fifteen years of his career. This is clearly also the part of Bowie's oeuvre that the author has the most appreciation for and the book book takes a riveting ride through Bowie's long musical career. I've not read a lot about David Bowie so far (although I occasionally leaf through Nicholas Pegg's "the Complete David Bowie" to get a more thorough appreciation of the meaning of his lyrics). I was pleasantly surprised by the abundance of information on the first phase of Bowie's career. Dimery is clearly less enamoured by the more commercial phase that Bowie went through in the eighties and even the many experiments that Bowie was able to pursue in the nineties. This is a book which can easily be doubled to 300 pages to further explore the last thirty years of his life more thoroughly. As I finished the book, his songs continued playing in my head, and I was left wanting for more. So now to play David Bowie's "My Death"...… (mehr)