The Beautiful Ones is a splendidly produced book… and if we are only to have fragments, then these are the very best ones to have: childhood, his complex relationship with his handsome father… and his beautiful complicated mother Mattie… this book is a fun glance, a tiny bolt from what now feels like a very distant past, and will leave you feeling nothing but huge affection for little, brilliant Skipper.

A compelling curiosity that finds its author orbiting around a few touchingly intimate encounters with his sphinx-like subject… with passages, lyric sheets and photographs from the Purple One himself.

Admittedly, The Beautiful Ones is a book in pieces, fragments of the ground-braking autobiography Prince had planned. Pieced together after his death in 2016, it collects his handwritten childhood memoirs, superb personal photographs and his chosen co-writer Dan Piepenbring’s vivid account of their brief collaboration. Yet remarkably despite the central absence, it still catches something of Prince between the gaps- a trace of perfume, a glance to camera, a first kiss.

The Beautiful Ones is for everyone. It doesn't matter whether you're a Prince fanatic or if your interest is simply piqued by all things music or pop culture: The book is worth picking up.The Beautiful Ones is not a read, but an experience, an immersion inside the mind of a musical genius. You are steeped in Prince's images, his words, his essence… The book can be a starting point for a Prince fascination, or a continuation of long-standing admiration. Either way, it will deepen the connection of any reader with the musical icon.

It’s both a pleasure and a surprise to say that although The Beautiful Ones may not satisfy fans’ wildest dreams, it delivers much, much more than we had any reason to expect. As is clear from editor Dan Piepenbring’s very long intro, Prince took the project very seriously, and it shows in the work he delivered. Although the actual autobiography segment of this book ends at the end of Prince’s teens, it shines an intimate and revealing light on the least-known period of his life — his childhood — which is embellished with family photos, notes and other ephemera.

Piepenbring’s introduction certainly gives a sense of the singer, someone who was both otherworldly and prosaic.

The Beautiful Ones is an affirmation of Prince’s Blackness and humanity…. Prince writes about his childhood with clarity and poetic flair, effortlessly combining humorous anecdotes with deep self-reflection and musical analysis….It’s another truth about him that is rarely explored in the media…. The Beautiful Ones shows that Prince is one of us — he just worked to manifest dreams that took him from the North Side of Minneapolis to the Super Bowl. It encourages us to tap into our power to design the lives we envision for ourselves and set a precedent for future generations to do the same.

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.