Meredith Ochs

This is a new edition of a book I read a few years ago. The big extra is 10 removable reproductions of memorabilia, which makes getting a physical copy of this essential for the diehard Springsteen fan. What follows is what I wrote about the book previously since it still holds.

Bruce Springsteen from Meredith Ochs offers a very nice biography with plenty of photographs both familiar and unfamiliar. The biography itself does a great job of walking the line between being too detailed for this type of book and being too shallow and just touching the highlights. A reader who doesn't know much about Springsteen's life (I'm assuming there are a few) will get enough to appreciate what he has accomplished and perhaps whet the whistle to learn more about him and his music. For those of us who have been fans since the 70s it is a great walk down memory lane with a few new tidbits or reminders of things we forgot.

Most readers buy an illustrated biography for the photographs and this volume doesn't disappoint. We follow his evolution from learning to play and write through to his iconic status.

For anyone considering this book I want to clear up a couple misconceptions. First, the font is not particularly small. My eyesight is not perfect but I had no trouble reading the text. Second, in the review copy I had, from the same source as another reviewer, every picture had explanatory text with it. It wasn't right next to each picture but at the bottom of the page. But if one was reading the book one would see the captions there. If one was just skimming through the book then one might miss them. But as long as you plan to read the book you won't have any trouble finding the captions for the pictures. So don't let someone's skimming the book mislead you.

Since many readers considering this book likely know a fair amount about his life, I want to suggest another book that would make a great companion to this one. This book is as much about nostalgia and what he and his music means for us. Another book, Long Walk Home from Rutgers University Press, collects a number of essays of people writing about what Springsteen and his music has meant in their lives. In some ways, when a fan of his reads this book by Ochs we are, in our minds, writing our own essay about what he meant to our life, so this other book offers other people's lives in a similar way.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.… (lisätietoja)