About book I'm Your Man: The Life Of Leonard Cohen (2012)
Leonard Cohen is fascinating, and he seems even more fascinating with every passing year. For most of his life, he was a dark horse--a songwriter's songwriter, a marginal folk singer, a Canadian poet. But it's now safe to say that Cohen has finally arrived, in every way--as a writer, a performer, a man-in-history. Even at 570 pages, Simmons' biography is a brisk account of his life, and a valuable one. But it's a rock biography, a very well done celebrity biography, and Cohen really demands something more. Simmons is very strong on appearances--how Cohen looks at different times in his life, album covers, etc.--but the most interesting thing about Cohen isn't his rock stardom or his mid-level celebrity. It's his writerly journey. Simmons covers his movements in detail, from the small literary community of Montreal to the Chelsea Hotel to the Buddhist retreat in California, but she never really tells us what Cohen has been searching for, and therefore never tells us what drives his odd, distinctive lyrics. Janis Joplin may have inspired "Chelsea Hotel #2," for example, but "Chelsea Hotel #2" is not about Janis Joplin.In the end, Simmons has a genre problem. She has written a very good music biography. But to understand Leonard Cohen, we need an intellectual history. Infinitely preferable to Tim Footman's shonky 'Leonard Cohen Hallelujah', if only becuase Simmons writes entertaining prose and got round to interviewing a lot of people who were absent from Footman's, and also from Nadal's. It doesn't stand up against the high standards of contemporary literary biography. As several other reviewers have mentioned, it trends towards rock hagiography, but then if anyone is going to provide the secular version of spirituality through songs, it may well be Mr. Cohen. Enjoyable reading.
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What can I say? It's a biography - well written and fact filled.
—tapatapa1973
