Reckless Daughter, David Yaffe
Reckless Daughter, David Yaffe
3 Rating(s)
List: $34.99 | Sale: $24.50
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Reckless Daughter
A Portrait of Joni Mitchell

Author: David Yaffe

Narrator: Xe Sands

Unabridged: 12 hr 15 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 10/17/2017


Synopsis

Joni Mitchell is a cultural touchstone for generations of Americans. In her heyday she released ten experimental, challenging, and revealing albums; her lyrics captivated people with the beauty of their language and the rawness of their emotions, both deeply personal to Mitchell and universally relatable to her audience. In this intimate biography, composed of dozens of in-person interviews with Mitchell, David Yaffe reveals the backstory behind the famous songs—from her youth on the Canadian prairie, her pre-vaccine bout with polio at age nine, and her early marriage and the child she gave up for adoption, up through the quintessential albums and love affairs, and all the way to the present—and shows us why Mitchell has so enthralled her listeners, her lovers, and her friends.

Yaffe has had unprecedented access both to Mitchell and to those who know her, drawing on interviews with childhood friends and the cast of famous characters (Joan Baez, Judy Collins, Leonard Cohen, David Crosby, and more) with whom she has crossed paths and influenced, as well as insightful analyses of her famous lyrics, their imagery and style, and what they say about the woman herself.

About David Yaffe

David Yaffe was born in Dallas, Texas, in 1973. He has written on numerous subjects (music, film, theater, dance, higher education) for the Nation, New York, Slate, the New York Times, the New Republic, Harper's Magazine, and other publications. He is currently a professor of Humanities at Syracuse University, and is the author of Fascinating Rhythm: Reading Jazz in American Writing and Bob Dylan: Like a Complete Unknown.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Paul

Biographies are quite dangerous books, they can turn on you just like that, take a whole lump out of you before you can say wait, I didn’t want to know that. Don’t tell me. Please. No. I like biographies of people I don’t care too much about, like the Marquis de Sade, or Kathy Acker or H P Lovecraft......more

Goodreads review by Dave

I was just walking near Lake Michigan and saw a young woman wearing a Woodstock T-Shirt, I had just listened to this biography's focus on that period, and I stopped to tell her. "Oh!" she said, "Who's Joni Mitchell?" I smiled, seeing my mistake that the t shirt might have actually meant something to......more

Goodreads review by Vanessa

This book really celebrates the unique talent of Joni Mitchell, someone who conjures the true hippie spirit of the 60’s & 70’s, a singer that is quintessentially and synonymously the voice of the folk hippie scene. A simple prairie girl from Canada emerges when she picks up the guitar and discovers h......more