The number one greatest music book ever

Quite simply the best rock and roll biography ever written

The best rock 'n' roll biography ever written . . . There is a novelistic intensity to this story of tragedy, triumph and love. Its portrayal of a society alien to mainstream America is riveting

Brilliant . . . the best account we have of how the first rock and rollers were torn between salvation and the Devil's music

What a wonderful and unusual idea. Ruth Padel writes with true passion; her love for, and understanding of, the man and his music shine through each poem

Beethoven’s music encompasses the entire blinding spectrum of human thought and emotion, from violent to ethereal, from chaos to sublimity. Ruth Padel’s poems encompass that uncontainable spirit to an astounding degree, and preserve the primal shock of our first hearing

Breathtaking

The stories told in The Beautiful Ones are filmic dreams of a life.

The Beautiful Ones remains a jewel like fragment, Piepenbring’s sensitive introduction providing a snapshot of the Purple One’s last months at Paisley Park and during the Piano and Microphone tour.

Piepenbring doesn't just want to write this memoir with Prince, he wants to do it right (whatever "right" is, Prince always colored way outside of the purple lines). Once Prince dies and the book project lives on, Piepenbring also wants to do right by his idol…. This means we get a memoir that is written by Prince, literally. Handwritten pages he had shared with Piepenbring make up Part 1, taking us from his first memory — his mother's eyes — through the early days of his career…. We also get a memoir that is carefully curated by Piepenbring, who writes that he was able to go through Paisley Park, room-by-room, sorting through Prince's life… The Beautiful Ones doesn't paint a perfect picture. It's not definitive. It can't be, it shouldn't be and, thankfully, it doesn't try to be. We'll never know what it might have been if Prince had lived. But it's a good start. Now, it's up to us to take what's there and make something out of it for ourselves, creating, just as Prince wanted.

The book kicks off with Piepenbring’s engrossing tale behind the memoir…That soon gives way to the pages the artist wrote before his passing...These recollections are tender and heartfelt…a rare treasure trove for Prince fanatics

This sumptuous-looking illustrated tribute to the late, great musician and singer tells the official story of Prince's life, through his own words and personal effects.

Prince’s voice comes through loud and clear; his personality, joie de vivre and single-mindedness jumping off the page throughout.'

A beautifully crafted objet d’art

Prince's posthumous memoir conceals as much as it reveals, but remains a beautiful and strange book.

Worth every penny.

This is a beautiful book and a must-have for Prince completists

A ghostly memoir of a pop legend

The Beautiful Ones is not a traditional memoir of the trailblazer, more a collage of stories, notes, and pictures, […] a fascinating document.

Prince’s deeply personal memoir, that includes never-seen photos, scrapbooks and lyric sheets. It’s a must for all fans.

Other books will surely dig deeper into the life and the music, but his glows with a special allure, gilded as it is by the touch of the creator himself.

If you adored the amazing performer […] then you should get your hands on this amazing memoir, written by the artist himself in The Beautiful Ones. Prince provides incredible anecdotes about his meteoric rise to stardom, sharing photos and memorabilia that have never been seen before.

Beautifully constructed, clear-eyed and generous-spirited.

Stories endure in this compelling debut.

A noble quest to understand the dazzling respect for music embedded in Russian culture.

An intoxicating journey into the wilds of Siberia.

An account of dogged journeys through Siberia from the Urals to the Sea of Okhotsk... Roberts's pages sing like a symphony.

Abdurraqib, known for his playful, intelligent sense of humor on Twitter, highlights amazing performances that shed light on societal constructions and moments of sheer joy his book about Black culture in America. Writing about joy is challenging; falling back on cliche is a constant temptation that Abdurraqib avoids in this insightful tome

That sense of limitlessness wraps itself around every essay in Abdurraqib's newest book, A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance. In it, he writes about Black performance in America-from Great Depression-era dance marathons to the enduring cool of Don Cornelius to the art of Mike Tyson entering a boxing ring-with both great reverence and rigorous analysis. The book, in the way Abdurraqib's work so often does, erects monuments to our should-be legends and our unignorable icons alike, and paints an expansive, deeply felt portrait of the history of Black artistry

This deft consideration of seemingly irreconcilable values, between the personal and private dimensions of performance, can be found throughout the essays in A Little Devil in America...Abdurraqib sees performance as a site of radical questioning, experimentation, and dream-making. This book is not a work of theory. It is sensual. We watch him watching his idols and we watch him dancing along with them, sometimes clumsily. If Brooks's goal is to make a case for performers' intellectualism, Abdurraqib's is to help us understand how they teach us to live richer, more embodied lives

Engrossing and moving ... A new, poetic take on essays that, I think, changes the game in many ways.

Astonishing, impressive ... the connections he makes point to the enduring influence of Black art ... a book as bold as it is essential

Abdurraqib writes with uninhibited curiosity and insight about music and its ties to culture and memory, life and death, on levels personal, political, and universal.

A towering work full of insightful observations about everything from the legacy of Nina Simone to the music of Bruce Springsteen... a powerful work about art, society, and the perspective through which its author regards both.

A joyful requiem - emphasis on joyful. Abdurraqib has written a guide for the living as well as a memorial for those we have lost.

As powerful and touching as anything I've read this year, and Abdurraqib has emerged as the Ta-Nehisi Coates of popular culture.