David Bowie

April 11, 2011
Drawing upon more than 250 new interviews with friends of Bowie and on previously published interviews with Bowie, former Mojo editor affectionately chronicles the life and music of Bowie from his childhood and youth to the high points of his career, his recent heart attack and almost total disappearance from the music scene. By the time he was 11, Bowie's charm was developed, a trait that brought him the breaks and opportunities that his ever-active mind learned to exploit. Bowie emerges from Trynka's portrait as a less than consummate musician and more an ambitious individual who knew how to get exactly what he wanted from those around him. From the growling guitars of "Suffragette City" and the driving dance beats of "Young Americans" to the stuttering syncopation of "Fame" and the Beatles-like riffs of "Changes," Bowie, in Trynka's hands, is a man who has never settled for the predictable. The lack of any new interviews with Bowie, however, gives the biography the feel of a hagiography.

May 15, 2011

Everything you always wanted to know about the Thin White Duke. Everything.

Musically speaking, David Bowie never quite reached the critical or popular heights of fellow UK rockers the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Who and Led Zeppelin—granted, that was due in part to poor timing, as he came onto the scene at the tail end of the British Invasion. Yet despite his inconsistent catalog, he's managed to remain in the public consciousness for more than 40 years, which explains why he's proven to be a fascinating subject for long biographies. In 2009, Marc Spitz delivered the doorstopper Bowie: A Biography, and Nicholas Pegg is set to release The Complete David Bowie in late 2011. So does Ziggy Stardust merit all this coverage? Former Mojo editor Trynka offers an emphatic yes. The author gave Bowie's contemporary Iggy Pop the same treatment with Iggy Pop: Open Up and Bleed (2008), an insanely in-depth, honest and readable biography. Here, Trynka once again covers it all—the music, the movies, the marriages, the shifting personae, the drugs, the drugs and the drugs—in a breezy, chatty style that often reads as a novel. The author remains objective about Bowie's music, most notably during his lengthy discussion about how much of a hand his sidemen played in the development and recording of his records, and the fact that Trynka isn't sycophantic about David's undeniably hit-and-miss discography helps legitimize the project. But despite its numerous positive attributes, the book is exhaustive to a fault. By the time most readers are three-quarters of the way through, they'll probably want to listen to "Space Oddity" and "Heroes," then call it a day.

Bowie nerds will love it, and music nerds will admire it; regular nerds and most others will think it's about 150 pages too long.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

February 15, 2011

Music journalist Trynka has already done Iggy Pop, so why not the Starman himself? He uses more than 300 fresh interviews to enliven the text. Buy wherever rock star bios glitter.

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.