I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen - Couverture souple

Simmons, Sylvie

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 022409064X ISBN 13 : 9780224090643

Editeur : Jonathan Cape, 2012

A propos du livre

Quatrième de couverture :

The legend behind such songs as “Suzanne,” “Bird on the Wire” and “Hallelujah” andthe poet and novelist behind such groundbreaking literary works as Beautiful Losers and Book of Mercy, Leonard Cohen is one of the most important and influential artists of our era, a man of powerful emotion and intelligence whose work has explored the definitive issues of human life—sex, religion, power, meaning, love. Cohen is also a man of complexities and seeming contradictions: a devout Jew, who is also a sophisticate and ladies’ man, as well as an ordained Buddhist monk whose name, Jikan—“ordinary silence”—is quite the appellation for a writer and singer whose life has been anything but ordinary.

I’m Your Man is the definitive account of that extraordinary life. Acclaimed music journalist Sylvie Simmons crafts a portrait of Cohen as nuanced as the man himself, drawing on a wealth of research that includes Cohen’s personal archives and more than a hundred exclusive interviews with those closest to Cohen—from his lovers, friends, monks, professors, rabbis and fellow musicians to his muses, including Rebecca De Mornay, Marianne Ihlen, Suzanne Elrod and Suzanne Verdal—and most important, with Cohen himself, whose presence infuses these pages.

Starting in Montreal, Cohen’s birthplace, where he first found fame as a poet in the fifties, Simmons follows his trail, via London and the Greek island of Hydra, to New York in the sixties, where he launched his music career. From there she traces the arc of his prodigious achievements to his remarkable retreat in the mid-nineties—when on the cusp of marriage to a beautiful actress and enjoying the success of his best-selling album to date, he entered a monastery on a rocky mountaintop above Los Angeles—and finally to his reemergence for a sold-out world tour almost fifteen years later. Whether navigating Cohen’s journeys through the back streets of Mumbai or the countless hotel rooms where he has stayed along the way, Simmons explores with equal focus every complex, contradictory strand of Cohen’s life—from the halls of academia to the arenas of rock ’n’ roll—and presents a deeply insightful portrait of both the artist and the man whose vision, spirit, depth and talent continue to move people like no one else.

Revue de presse :

“I’m Your Man is the major, soul-searching biography that Leonard Cohen deserves... a mesmerizing labor of love.” (Janet Maslin, New York Times)

“A thoughtful celebration of the artist’s life...Simmons has deftly narrated Cohen’s evolution... In the end, this biography has the oddest effect: as soon as you finish reading it you feel an overwhelming impulse to go back and begin again, revisiting the story with what you’ve learned along the way.” (A.M. Homes, New York Times Book Review)

“A new gold standard of Cohen bios.” (Los Angeles Times)

“This is the bio Cohen has long deserved, and it makes every prior Cohen book practically unnecessary.” (Rolling Stone, 4 1/2 Stars)

“The book is a seductive tribute to a master seducer.” (The Onion A.V. Club)

“A deep, enlightening book. . . Simmons, a music journalist and short-story writer, knows how to research and write and keep a critical distance from Cohen, who opens up some but uses his usual weapons, politeness and self-deprecation, to maintain an air of mystery.” (The Oregonian (Portland))

“Leonard fought darkness through his work and... the light ultimately prevailed when he triumphantly toured the world for three years beginning in 2008... ‘You could hear the hairs stand up on people’s arms,’ writes Simmons of the hushed reverence of his audience. This book demands a similar reaction.” (MOJO Magazine, 5 Stars)

“This is a revelatory biography that investigates not just an artist’s life, but the life of his art.” (Shelf Awareness)

“In I’m Your Man, we see not only the life of one man who was transformed by words, but how we ourselves may be transformed by them.” (New York Jewish Week)

“Simmons’ rich, compelling and provocative book... is a star-studded but also frank account of how the music industry really works and, at the same time, a discerning portrait of one especially important musician.” (Jewish Journal Los Angeles)

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Jonathan Cape
• Date d'édition: 2012
• ISBN 10: 022409064X
• ISBN 13: 9780224090643
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 560