Leonard Cohen Biographies

[sbreen]

Is anyone able/willing to rate/rank the many biographies?

[John Etherington]

I've only read four of them, but here are my thoughts on each:

"Various Positions" (Ira Nadel). Definitely the best published bio, to date. Well-written, generally accuate, and a thoroughly enjoyable book to read. I learned a lot from it.

"Leonard Cohen - A Life in Art" (Ira Nadel). Good, but slighter work. Written shortly before "Various Positions" which was the real deal.

"In Every Style of Passion" (Jim Devlin). Another book well-worth having. Jim didn't set-out to write a full biography or the most complete book on Leonard, but his work is thorough and emerged out of his labour of love "The Leonard Cohen Information Servive" (in the pre-Internet days). I get an acknowledgment in this book, because I had some brain-storming sessions with Jim when he was writing it.

"Leonard Cohen - Prophet of the Heart" (L.S. Gorman & C.E. Rawlins). Gets credit for being the first major biography of Leonard, and a long one too. However, I found the book quite heavy going, and the style of writing rather odd (for instance they use numerous exclamation marks).

You should find most of the above on Amazon (generally reasonably priced second-hand).

Two more recent books are the ones below, so will contain later information (the others were all published before 2000). I haven't read these two yet:

"Hallelujah" by Tim Footman. This gets three and a half stars on Amazon. I've heard it's okay if not ground-breaking, with some errors.

"Leonard Cohen - A Remarkable Life" by Anthony Reynolds. Again gets three and a half stars on Amazon. The author took an original approach and I think focused on Leonard's recordings. He got quite a lot of criticism for the errors in it (of which I believe there were 200!). Probably best to wait for the second edition of this.

The book I'm most looking forward to is "I'm Your Man: Leonard Cohen - The Biography" by Sylvie Simmons, which I believe is published in October. Sylvie is a very respected music writer, and has interviewed Leonard for this book. I would expect it to be the best.

All good things, John E

[sbreen]

I have "Various Positions", (a good read) "Hallelujah" and "Leonard Cohen - A Remarkable Life".

I thought there must be others out there. Good to know that there are.

I have just picked up "Yesterday's Tomorrow" by Marc Hendrickx (unread as yet).
The first few pages appear to be more about the author than Cohen himself - but I'll persevere.

I'll keep my eye out for the others - and for the biography by Sylvie Simmons when it is available.

Many thanks
sue

[Maarten]

I have just picked up "Yesterday's Tomorrow" by Marc Hendrickx (unread as yet).
The first few pages appear to be more about the author than Cohen himself - but I'll persevere.sue

Sue,
Good observation about this book, even though you're only a couple of pages far... Hendrickx is a Belgian writer, but I don't like him that much and the book is indeed more about his ego than about LC unfortunately... The book has a cd in it with LC covers by Yasmine which is pretty nice. After the book was released, Yasmine went on tour with her songs and wanted to use some lines from the book during her theatre tour about LC, but Hendrickx didn't approve of that because he thaught Yasmine wasn't a true Cohen fan and she was only in it for the money... (while my personal observation is quite the opposite: Yasmine has only done one "tribute" album in her life, while Hendrickx has writen a couple of "biographies" (on Muhammed Ali, Elvis, Keith Richards, ...) which I suspect to be more about himself than about the subject from the title of the book...).
It even ended in a law suit etc... Not a nice story at all!

Botom line: I didn't finish reading the book (well, I finished after 30 pages or so) so perhaps I should try and read it again from cover to cover, but I don't think that will change my opinion.

Let me know if I'm wrong and I'd be pleased to give it a try again!

Maarten

[sbreen]

[/quote]Let me know if I'm wrong and I'd be pleased to give it a try again![quote]

Maarten
You are definitely NOT wrong!