A marvelous blending of the life stories of three women who came of age at the beginning of the feminist movement, but who came from very different places. Carole, a young bride and mother from Brooklyn, Joni from distant Canada, and Carly from upper-middle class New York.

They each have a major issue to come to terms with: for Carole, it was life after the smashing success of Tapestry; for Joni, it was the struggle to stay true to her art while remaining relevant in the record universe (as well as coping with putting her baby up for adoption); and for Carly, it was being taken seriously given her privileged upbringing and living with James Taylor's addiction. The resolution of these issues, and their quest to find a comfortable place for their work in the middle-aged world, make for an excellent read.

The paths they took and the times they lived through are fascinating for those of us who came after and should be read by young women today who really don't have a sense of how far women have come since the 1960s.

Packed with detail, the book is at times awkward to read (too many dashes, parentheses and footnotes!), but when you overlook the poor editing, it is hard to put down.

Let me begin by giving credit where credit is due: this is a great idea for a book, and if you were going to write a book like this, I can't imagine assigning a researcher with any more zeal than Sheila Weller.
Unfortunately, the poor woman simply can not write.
Having grown up in the era described, the forced veneer of social commentary contained nothing new to me, but could be instructive for those of a more tender age. But having grown up in the era described, I can tell you that the three subjects of this book had little if any commonality in terms of either their music, or their relation to the youth/feminist cultural awakening.
I don't want to belabor the point, but Ms. Weller must understand that there is no extra credit awarded for the greatest number of parenthetical statements, unsubstantiated conclusions, or incredibly bloated sentences.
As has been stated in another review, the ultimate crime here is the absence of an editor--at least one familiar with the English language. The underlying structure of the book is all wrong; contined forced lurches between the three subjects is literary whiplash. The reader is much better off streaming together every third chapter to link the story of one of the individual singers. It is honestly difficult to believe that anyone associated with a sub-brand of Simon and Shuster really read this.
Which leads to my personal conspiracy theory. Given that Carly Simon's father was one half of that publishing house, I can imagine a conversation in which the author pitched her idea for a book on Mitchell and King to an editor who answered, "not unless you also include Richard's kid--and if you do, we'll agree to print every last thing you put in your rough draft."
And they did.

This book is intelligent, cogent, and suffused with affection and empathy for these remarkable women and the era they lived through. Every page brought a new revelation. Sometimes you laughed, sometimes you wanted to cry. They lived grand lives to match their music, and the author got it, year by year by year. By the time it ended, I felt I'd re-lived those years and understood what hardy, hearty souls these talented women were and are. Bravo.

If ever a book needed a good edit; this is it. The book reads like a history of the music business as well as a history of the times, but the way the author structures it, she makes it extremely difficult to keep track of all the players in the lives of the three main protagonists.

Honestly, I wanted to enjoy this book and I did find many of the anecdotes interesting, but I couldn't possibly recommend this to anyone because I know it ends up reading more like an assignment. What a disappointment!

I found this book worth the long read. These women are great, mysterious, and foundation makers. Would recommend it to all women.

Like a flashback to the '60s and '70s - Weller weaves social history and commentary in with the backgrounds, trials, tribulations, and triumphs that shaped these trailblazing women and the impact they had on our lives and the music world. It is so interesting to learn of the inter-relationships between these women and so many other musicians, songwriters, producers and others. It's a great read and I can hardly put it down. Although I'm only halfway through, I know it will be the type of book that I'll be sorry when it ends.

This book was entertaining and interesting, but only if you are hard-core fans of the three women it is about. The jacket proclaims it is also the "Journey of a Generation"...not really. It reads like a glorifed People article.

It should be telling that not one of the women the book was written about gave an interview to the author. Also like others have commented, there are parts where important things are mentioned and then never touched on again, and the reverse, some fact is casually mentioned as if an entire previous chapter had been written about it leaving you wondering, "Did I miss something?"

I had such high hopes for this book, after the glowing pre-release reviews. I'm only at page 150 but may put it down. Here are my beefs so far:

1. Accuracy. Teachers in NY do not get teaching credentials. That is a Californiaism. Sheepshead Bay is nowhere near Red Hook. And 1 in 8 women do NOT get breast cancer! What a fundamental error. It is a 1 in 8 lifetime risk, not the same thing. If Weller makes errors in the factoids I know, where else has she gone wrong?

2. Do not write "Joni Mitchell has said" and then quote another writer's work. That is plagiarism. Do your own interviews or you do not have a book.

3. The writing is jumbled, an attempt to get in as many names as possible. Too many clauses. Hard to read. The use of "would" and then conjecturing about what someone thought is not necessarily accurate. I hate the passages describing someone, such as Neil Young, and then stating "His name was Neil Young" as if the reader couldn't figure that out. This approach is overly dramatic and annoying.

4. The connections among the women, as others have noted, are forced.

I so looked forward to reading this book. I will move on. Ricki Lewis

This is the first time I have ever been encouraged to comment on a book purchased through Amazon. But it is also the first time I have felt my money was taken under false pretenses.
I thought I was purchasing a book about three very acccomplished singer/songwriters.Two of whom are in my top five of all time. I thought that perhaps I would come to understand and learn a little as to what inspired such brilliant works of creativity.
Like many, I suspect, I knew some anecdotes about their history.
But on starting to read, I realised that the tone of this book seemed to be more about the authors own political bias and how she could trumpet her views which were inspired, in part, by her exposure to three strong independant women.In short. I felt I was reading a Lite Feminist Manifesto.
Now, there is nothing wrong with these views. They are just as valid as millions of others.
But, I wanted to read a book about Creators of some of my favourite music and not a book about Right Wing Feminism.I say right Wing, because the author constantly re-inforced steriotypes that all men are Wife Beaters, Non committal and insensitive and responsible for every unfortunate decision that a women makes.
She is entitled to hold these views. I don't share them and as a result the book was annoying and difficult to read. I struggled to finish it and regretted doing so.
Now before the extreme politically minded get too upset,I am aware that the book was to have some relevance to Feminism and that these three individuals were inspirational to the movement. But, it dominates the book to such an extent that, I imagine, it alienates a goodly proportion of the prospective readership.
Perhaps the book should come with a warning that it is not so much about Carole, Joan and Carly but that it is more about the author's own political views, contextualised by her historical exposure to these three inspirational women.
I would then have waited for a truly impartial and factual Auto/Biography to spend my money on.

This book made me feel as if I were reading a thesis paper. Not being old enough to actually remember this time period, there were not enough actual song lyrics to bring songs to mind. I gave up after 180 pages. Didn't really care how it ended.

I was most interested in Carole King and Carly Simon and skipped most of Joni's sections. While I found the infusion of their lives creative, the writing style had a lot of run on sentences and were long and drawn out. I didn't care for that but I do give kudo's for the detailed research and their was a lot of interesting information about these women.

For many of us who grew up in the 1960's and 70's, the music of these 3 ladies had a profound impact on us. "Girls Like Us" gives us greater insight into their music, as well as the lives which produced the music. It's a fascinating read, and gives insight into that whole generation. Outstanding!

. . . just to finish reading this book. It's a long one, especially when you devour each little word contained in the many footnotes, but worth every hour spent. Reading this thorough, well-researched, and respectful biography of three notorious singer-songwriters, Carole King, Joni Mitchell and Carly Simon, from their days as young, aspiring artists to current days as grandmothers, was like listening to their music for the first time again. I couldn't help but break out my vinyl, stored in a moving box in the attic.

Sheila Weller clearly spent years gathering facts, information and quotes from those closest to these icons, (and in some cases from the women themselves), and braids the three stories together to paint a historical account of modern folk/rock/pop music. She doesn't merely regurgitate already published material from music reviews and Rolling Stone articles, but instead offers similarities and differences that made this reader appreciate the subjects as individuals as well as their contributions and reflections on the women's movement in general.

A surprising ribbon running through this braid is James Taylor, who had profound yet differing relationships with all three. What also ultimately struck me about the book was how deeply interested I was at the beginning and how it merely passed the time toward the end. I think it's a direct reflection on the careers of these women: exciting, fresh, ultra-talented in the beginning. . .but in the end, it becomes a biography of ordinary--albeit ambitious--women who've led extraordinary lives while looking for love and fulfillment, and endured tremendous public scrutiny. One thing the critics in our society can't take from them is their recorded music--their true biographies--and I, for one, will listen to them sing for the rest of my life.

Very well written, very well done and I certainly recommend this book to fans of these musicians (as well as James Taylor, and others like Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young), and to those interested in the music scene as it developed and evolved through the 1960s-1980s.

From the author of A Line Between Friends and The Things I Wish I'd Said.

. . . just to finish reading this book. It's a long one, especially when you devour each little word contained in the many footnotes, but worth every hour spent. Reading this thorough, well-researched, and careful biography of three notorious singer-songwriters, Carole King, Joni Mitchell and Carly Simon, was like listening to their music for the first time again. I couldn't help but break out my vinyl, stored in a moving box in the attic.

Sheila Weller clearly spent years gathering facts, information and quotes from those closest to these icons, (and in some cases from the women themselves), and braids the three stories together to paint a historical account of modern folk/rock/pop music. She doesn't merely regurgitate already published material from music reviews and Rolling Stone articles, but instead offers similarities and differences that made this reader appreciate the subjects as individuals as well as their contributions and reflections on the women's movement in general.

A surprising ribbon running through this braid is James Taylor, who had profound yet differing relationships with all three. What also ultimately struck me about the book was how deeply interested I was at the beginning and how it merely passed the time toward the end. I think it's a direct reflection on the careers of these women: exciting, fresh, ultra-talented in the beginning. . .but in the end, it becomes a biography of ordinary--albeit ambitious--women who've led extraordinary lives while looking for love and fulfillment, and endured tremendous public scrutiny. One thing the critics in our society can't take from them is their recorded music--their true biographies--and I, for one, will listen to them sing for the rest of my life.

Very well written, very well done and I certainly recommend this book to fans of these musicians (as well as James Taylor, and others like Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young), and to those interested in the music scene as it developed and evolved through the 1960s-1980s.

From the author of A Line Between Friends and The Things I Wish I'd Said.

It appears that Carly Simon was the only willing participant of three women being sensationalized in this book. The author failed to investigate or report what she may have, or not known, about Carly's many faces lifts and struggles with anorexia and bulimia. Maybe because, Carly snuggled up to the author, and dropped a few choice bits of dirt, on her infamous rival Joni Mitchell. Looks as if, the author gave Carly some leeway, for becoming the teachers pet. Poor Carol King is simply massacred to oblivion, left, right and center.

"I" feel a lot of what was written, was the same-old press-release mumbo-jumbo we'd been getting for 20+yrs. The few tawdry tid-bits seem only to be Carly's tools to help season her career and legacy. It was a strategically nasty Carly Simon who blared out the families dirty laundry in a scaving Vanity Fair interview in August 1994

http://www.carlysimon.net/board/viewtopic.php?t=2491&highlight=&sid=d2f5f8d42117ed8bb2586b690cf8665a

Carly, unabashedly spoke of her mothers graphic incidences w/ bowel incontinence and sexual indiscretions. Carly, like a nice monster, waited till her mother was dead, to run riot over Andrea's grave and reputation, thru the media. As they say "dead mothers, tell no tails"

I was a big fan of Carly Simon's, however; over the years I have seen more deeply inside her. I think its understandable to have an expedition of an artist that builds their image on being sensitive, ecologically and politicly concerned. Carly Simon is one among many old age hippies, who indulged themselves with face-lifts wile clad in Dolce Gabbana, and harboring adulterous ex-presidents on Martha's Vineyard.

I would rather read about Melanie!

Girls Like Us is one of the most fascinating books I've read this year. I've long been an admirer of Carole King, Joni Mitchell, and Carly Simon individaully and I guess I was vaguely aware that there was a thread that linked all three: James Taylor. I've been a fan of James Taylor since his first record on Apple. This book is almost as much about James Taylor as it is about the three stated subjects. Without a doubt, this is one of the most candid accounts of the various ways people achieve success in the music business I've ever read, and I read about this subject all the time. All three women come from totally different social strata. Obvious advantages turn to disadvantages and vice versa. Weller does not whitewash or try to flatter anyone. King's masochism, Mitchell's arrogance, and Simon's nymphomania (I don't know what else you'd call it!) are discussed as candidly as Henry Miller would have done. Taylor's drug addiction, too, is explored in detail. So, you think you have a little musical talent and would like to do this professionally? Well, this book tells you who makes it in the music business and who doesn't. These are the faults you can get away with and the talents you have to have, and in some cases the faults you have to have to achieve great success selling records and concert tickets. The book also examines the lifestyles of people who have achieved great success not just in the music business but in western society. I came away with a different view of the term "middleclass morality." The poor and the wealthy both have their own ways of doing things. Only the middleclass cares what other people think of them. That's what keeps them middleclass. Fame and success are swords that cut both ways. People have no idea how to treat those who have achieved them. If you try to be candid and honest, you come off seeming ungrateful, arrogant, and unrealistic. If you try to engage as an artist or a business person in your own right, you come off as a user or a confidence trickster. Even artists at the same level wind up competing with each other financially and sexually. The pleasures of achieving great wealth and recognition for your art is a tremendous ego trip. The ability to recognize the people who can make this happen for you, and your willingness to give them what they want and need until you pass them and move to the next level is what each of these three stories is about. Weller interviewed dozens of people who knew these women at every juncture of their lives. She gives us whole quotes from these interviews, not distilled or interpreted abridgements. In some cases the interveiw subject comes off as bitter and insincere, others are compassionate or analytical. The reader comes away with consistent "big pictures" of three powerful women who have truly achieved the American Dream... such as it is.

This was an interesting book--particularly the sections on the elusive Carole King. It also reinforced my natural inclination to dislike Joni Mitchell. But those gigantic, never-ending footnotes that digress so wildly are a real turnoff!

I really enjoyed this book for many of the same reasons that other reviewers have listed. However, this author is badly in need of an editor. The book is filled with long sentences filled with parenthetical asides and unrelated side comments. It took me twice as long to read because I had to read sentences two or three times to completely comprehend the message.

I am also left the observation that each of these women possess amazing talent and have enjoyed great success. None of them has been able to sustain constructive, satisfying relationships. I suppose that's part of the point.

This book helps the reader understand not just how these women changed the music scene (in a wonderful way) but also how they changed the lives of women in general. Carly in particular did a lot for helping women understand their influence and power in what was largely a mans world. While Joni and Carole struggled with still trying to fit into the "old ways" (Joni giving up an out of wedlock baby, Carole marrying very young when she discovered she was pregnant), Carly on the other hand was so comfortable with her sexuality that her example was liberating to a whole generation of women. I don't think she gets enough credit for this, even in Weller's book. As for myself, I say thank you Carly. Although it's easy to be sexy and comfortable with yourself when your legs are a mile long and your sexy smile a mile wide, this was the 60s.

I gave this book to my 68 year old wife for mother's day and she absolutely loved it. My daughter, who lives in the Netherlands, and her 40 something friends, are also reading it and loving it. They want to know what is behind their mothers' sixties attitudes.

Interesting to find out how long they took to become an overnight success and the trials and troubles encountered on the journey! Very well researched and presented. Reader can certainly tell that much time and frank dialog went into the creation of this book.

Fascinating, exhaustively researched bio of all three famous singer-songwriter women. The chapters alternate between the three, showcasing their lives and the times they lived in and, at least musically, helped to shape. I devoured the Joni chapters, having always been a big fan, but found out many new things about her and loved the mostly altogether new info on King and Simon. This is an important book about the voices of women in a male dominated field, about artistic and personal choices, about the changing landscape of American music in the 50s, 60s, and 70s - and beyond. Weller traces the influence of the singers' lives as they emerged in their songs, and interviews some of the people closest to all three women, not an easy feat, and not one, I think, that's been accomplished before. Carly Simon is most available to Weller, and Joni, of course, the least, although Carole's reticence is also notable. It's not ultimately a happy book, since for all three, bad relationships and decisions color their lives and music: Joni's abandonment of her baby to an adoption home and her ceaseless quest to find the right man, Carole's early success giving way to a history of marrying men who seemed to stunt her abilities, and Carly's eleven year commitment to James Taylor, throughout which he remained a drug addict. There is much comfort to the music lover though, because all three women produced a soundtrack to the baby boomers' era and remain creative today - they are, battle-scarred and aging, still standing.

I'm loving this journey back in time, into the lives, loves, and lessons learned, by these ground-breaking women of popular music...it might be generational as to who would enjoy this book most...but if you are in your 40's thru 60's you can easily relate...and remember where you were in life when these gals came out with their albums. The book goes back into the childhoods of these rockin' girls, and takes you along on their journey with incredible detail (alot of research was obviously done)...
I wish there were more pictures (none of Carly's family), but it's a great read!

This was purchased for my wife's bookclub reading of the month. She found it to be a fascinating read about three women who's work in music literally changed the face of music in the US during the 60's and 70's. It will bring back many memories for anyone over the age of 45 and will impress and surprise those younger about how much influence these women had on our society.

A great read and, especially for those born in the mid to late 1950's, a walk down memory lane as well as a reminder of how we came to be who we are.

Very interesting read with full sites and attributions. Kind of confusing that she went back and forth between the girls all the time. Lots of background on all three that was not common knowledge.

This book is written in a fragmented manner that I found difficult to follow and consequently less interesting. I may shelve it for now and pick it up again later.

I got this book because I'm a fan of some of these women and I wanted to know why the '60s was such a big deal (I'm younger). Almost from the first page, I fell down a rabbit home into an absorbing story that felt like a movie and brought the whole era alive. Finally I know what people are talking about when they talk about those times. Also you feel the women's lives up close, their challenges and how particular they are. Carole and Carly and Joni came alive to me, as if I knew them. I do have a small quibble and that is that toward the end the author put in a lot of albums and songs that were not as important as the earlier ones, so I wanted to skim past them. All in all though, I didn't want this book to end.

Finally a book about some of the ladies of soft rock. The writer has lots of interviews and has put the timeline together. You will get the who, what, where, when, you just never get much of the why or the so what? Lots of gossip, little understanding.
Did the 60's/70's lifestyle help these women or ultimately hurt them? Was the only path to be a writer? Looking back, what do they regret, other than the obvious problem of Joni Mitchell with her daughter. How has time healed?

Author sure did her homework--but when it came time to sit down at the keyboard, she apparently couldn't figure out exactly what to do with her hundreds (or is it thousands?) of hours of interviews.

Result is a badly-structured juggling act in which she valiently tries to keep stories of all three ladies (each of whom warrants a separate bio) in the air but frequently drops several of the balls to go off on unimportant tangents. Clumsy run-on sentences and endless footnotes (many of them fascinating factoids in and of themselves--but distracting nonetheless) make this a tough read for any but the most ardent fans of the talented title trio.

Most of the reviews for this book seem to fall into one of two categories: those who loved it, and those who wanted to love it but were disappointed.
I fall into the latter category. For those of us who are big fans of this trio of women, disappointment in love is not unknown!
At the risk of sounding repetitious, I had the following issues with this book: way too many footnotes (a separate book could be created from them) - rambling, twisty, hard-to-follow sentences - too many unimportant detours and side stories. While there were a few choice nuggets to be found, it wasn't worth the effort of slogging through this LONG book. I could have lived without knowing who Joni's song "Carey" was about, and I still don't know who Carly accused of being so vain!

Author sure did her homework--but when it came time to sit down at the keyboard, she apparently couldn't figure out exactly what to do with her hundreds (or is it thousands?) of hours of interviews. A sharp editor would have been a big help in focusing what is frequently a jumble of trivial information.

Result is a badly-structured juggling act in which she valiently tries to keep stories of all three ladies in the air but frequently drops several of the balls to go off on unimportant tangent. Clumsy run-on sentences and endless footnotes (many of them fascinating factoids in themselves--but distracting nonetheless) make this a tough read for any but the most ardent fans of the title trio.

I was unable to stick with this book. I think you have to be a die-hard fan of at least one of the subjects to be willing to go all the way through this prosaic text. I am not and so ended up scanning the photographs and donating it to the public library. Not worth the price, to me.

I would like to thank the amazing author of this brilliant, fun and informative novel for giving us a much needed contribution to the social history of the sixties, and beyond! The well-researched and thoroughly enjoyable read made my day (for the past number of weeks! ) and I can only look forward, with rapt anticipation, to the many future contributions she will no doubt be authoring in the years to come. I heartily reccomend this book as the ultimate summertime (or anytime..) read! :)_go, Girls Like Us!

unless you know nothing about this motley crew, i'd skip the sections on mitchell and simon as basically its a rehash of info we've heard ad nauseam. But the sections on king i found to be most interesting, even if i didn't get a real fix or grasp on her. Unlike simon and mitchell, carole is something of an enigma due to the lack of media buzz around her over the years. She may not cut as glamorous or savoury a figure as mitchell and simon, who both come off as neurotic and self-absorbed; but i found king's core values, especially as a mother, to be admirable, especially considering what she accomplished professionally. If I could have lunch with one of these women, it would for sure be Carole.

Read Girls Like Us through with great fascination. What a wonderful, accurate and evocative portrait of a time and what a great technical job of keeping the three separate story lines going and totally coherent. Each time Weller changed from one heroine to another, I sighed, not wanting to leave the one I was with, but within a paragraph I was totally immersed in the next.

Now that I've finished the book, what really stands out in my mind are the telling vignettes--moments that are so well described, so central to the characters and so much "of the moment" that I can see, smell, feel the particular scene and, at the same time, my mind is making connections between that specific moment, the themes of the book and the zeitgeist of the era/ place/subculture. One example occurs at the very beginning of the book with two pals sitting in Carole Klein's Brooklyn bedroom in 1956 paging through the Brooklyn phone book looking for a new name for Carole and stumbling upon "King".

I also loved the way that Weller illuminates the lives of her characters with lines from their songs. It's not so much that she explains the songs with biographical details--although it's nice to have the question of the identity of the man in "You're So Vain" settled--that would demean the songs and reduce them; it's more like she glorifies the lives of the characters with the songs that they wrote. Weller's image of Joani Mitchell sitting in her hotel room, afraid and unable to go on the stage at Woodstock and writing the anthem of the generation, "we are starlight/we are golden/and we've got to get back to the garden" is Joani Mitchel glorified by her talent and her work...

Beware of one thing: if you read this book with the dust jacket on in public, be prepared for an expanded social network. Person after person will come up to tell you, "Oh I (or my brother, or my sister) was Carly's greatest fan. (For some reason it's practically always Carly).

A great read, well researched, lots of detail and recommended for anyone who loves the music of any or all of Carole, Joni or Carly. It is also interesting as an insight into the behaviour of the 60s and 70s, times never to be repeated.

Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon--And the Journey of a Generation

I admit I enjoyed the insider stories and history of these women, but Sheila Weller has a bad habit of using extremely long and sometimes confusing sentences. I would have enjoyed the book more if she had come straight to the point in many instances instead of larding her insights and information with unwieldy constructions. Despite this, I DID like this book.

Don't like the writer's style much at all -- way too many footnotes, quite distracting from the story -- but the era itself is so interesting that the read rises above the writing.

This book relies too much on anonymous sources for my taste. I can see why Seymour Hersh would need to grant anonymity to the sources of his stories about national security, but Sheila Weller seems to have granted many of her sources anonymity in order to print particularly salacious anecdotes that will make her book more marketable. Weller claims to feel "confident of the respectability of the source[s'] motive[s] for the request" for anonymity, but that doesn't do much for the reader's confidence in her. The account of Joni Mitchell's alleged suicide attempt, for example, which is described in graphic language, relies solely on anonymous "confidante[s]" of Mitchell's. If Weller couldn't persuade any one of the "several people" she interviewed to go on the record about this alleged incident, perhaps it wasn't worth setting down in print. I'm sure that Weller is convinced this incident happened, but her account of it doesn't, for this reader, rise above the level of gossip. Her account of Mitchell's pregnancy in 1964-65, on the other hand, is bolstered by the recollections of interviewees like Duke Redbird, who were willing to be named as a sources. Although Weller admirably attempts to ground her book in sociological and historical accounts of American women born in the 1940s, her frequent reliance on unnamed "friends" or "confidantes" of her subjects for material makes the book read like an article in "US" magazine. If you can read the book on that level--and indeed most readers, like me, first excerpts of it in "Vanity Fair"--then it's very enjoyable. There are some titillating, "Rashomon"-like debates between interviewees about which men particular songs by Mitchell and Carly Simon are about: which parts of Mitchell's "A Case of You" are about Leonard Cohen and which are about James Taylor? I was delighted to learn that Mitchell's "Coyote," my favorite song of hers, is about Sam Shepard--until I noticed that there's no source, named OR unnamed, for this information.

What a joy to find a well-researched book about three famous singers I so much wanted to emulate as a young woman. This book not only chronicles three artists' lives, it captures the magic of a generation. If you lived through the 60's and 70's this is a must read. If you didn't, it serves as a an up-close and personal history lesson back to a time that influenced today's musical stylings and trends.

"Baby boomers please pay attention. Read this book!. It is so interesting, not only about these brilliant women, but its about music during the sixties and a lot of information and happenings around this time. Its like really did this happen. I loved it.

I am a lifelong fan of Carly Simon's and thought I knew everything about her...I was wrong! I admired both Carole King and Joni Mitchell, but didn't know much about either of them. I learned so much, and enjoyed every minute of it! I have a newfound respect for all three of these artists, and a greater appreciation of what they were up against as women in their generation, forging careers in music. I don't know how the author found all the information and sources she did, but I'm sure glad that she did. Fascinating, must-read book for any fan of these women, and music in general.

This is a most entertaining book - if you lived through this era it will bring memories flooding back, and if you are too young for this time, you'll wish that you'd been there. Because of the nature of the women of the book you will also meet James Taylor, Jerry Goffin, the Rolling Stones, and many other famous and notorious members of the music fraternity of the time. Well worth a read - I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Leah Jones, Queensland, Australia

Such a wonderful book! These ladies are my heroes! Tapestry was the first album I ever bought. This book brings me back to those early high school days! Great memories of a great decade!

I bought this book needing a good airplane read...well, I got a whole lot more! This book is much more than a prurient look into the lives of three women song writers/singers--it is not prurient at all...but incredibly insightful about a generation in huge transition. I couldn't put it down...and yes, I did read it on the plane from the West Coast to the Gulf...and even better than being really engaging, interesting, well written, etc., it almost made air travel tolerable...well, almost. Occasionally I did get interrupted to be offered 11 g.d. pretzels! I recommend this to anyone who wants a penetrating look into a generation, a decade and a really interesting time.

This book is what you'd expect from an author who has written previous books about OJ Simpson's marriage and the life of Amy Fisher. Kind of trashy with lots of sex and drugs and violence but low on the rock & roll. Sort of odd for a book about singers and musicians, but that's the way it's slanted. Oh, and throw in a few small attempts at describing what happened during the era to try to make the book meaningful.

Of course, as a man ten years younger than these women, it's true I'm not really the target audience. But I've had some kind of relationship with the music of all three at some point over the years, whether it be liking Carly's voice and photos back then, or the many great pop songs Carole wrote long ago, or that Joni's Hejira remains one of my favorite albums of all time even though in general I wasn't a fan of hers at all.

But this book added very little to those relationships. For its size, it's an astonishingly lightweight book. The best thing I took from it was learning who were the subjects of a few songs, and I had to wade through a lot of dreck to find that.

I found this book fascinating. Far more than just the story of the 3 women
(King, Mitchell,Simon) it is a story of the whole rock scene from the 60s
to present. You really don't have to be a hard core fan of any of these three singers to enjoy their stories. Someone you knew and liked will show up at some point.

As a "woman of a certain age" I could certainly relate to this book. Yes, it is a bit of a guilty addiction, like watching "Entertainment Tonight", to read intimate details of famous lives. I also have to agree the writers sentence structure was somewhat exasperating and Carly Simon is not really in the same league with Carole King or Joni Mitchell. I did like her use of these 3 lives to illuminate the changes in what it meant to be a woman during those times. For the most part, I believe she got that right and you don't have to agree with every point to enjoy this as a great nostalgic read. As I read, I did get the feeling of "being there" and, while it's not "War and Peace", it sure is an engrossing and fun read for us boomer ladies. Men may not get it or even want to try.

I really wanted to like this book as this was my generation and music ruled our lives. Unfortunately, the book is overwritten, confusing, and at times downright boring. Enough already with the unimportant name dropping and the New York zip codes? Where was the editor?

This is a fabulous biography that unfolds the legend of three amazing women. The author masterfully weaves zeitgeist, music, feminism and the innate passion that lived in the heart of these three prodigies into a well articulated and accessible story. If the 1970s was a time for you and you love music...I can't imagine NOT reading this book!