Cher: All I Really Want to Do

by Daryl Easlea, Eddi Fiegel

B&W photo insert

272 pages, Paperback

First published March 19, 2013

Reviews

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are unauthorized biographies and then there are unauthorized biographies, and you really want to read the kind where the subject refused to have anything to do with the book because the biographer was treading on sensitive territory, the Kitty Kelley model. Those are the good juicy ones. And then there are the biographies where the subject had zero involvement from the start, so all the material is found and rehashed from previous interviews... and that's this one. It's not bad, but it reads like more of an extended discography/filmography/costume analysis. The quotes of Cher's from other sources are so lively that they throw the rest of it into a sort of drab contrast. I did like reading about how her acting career evolved, and frankly the book made me want to go out and find some more primary material. Cher is a hoot.

[Sarah Irvin · Rating 4 out of 5]

What I found completely refreshing about this book was the analysis of Cher's work rather than her life. Because let's face it, her life has been put under a microscope and analyzed in every conceivable way, and while some of the biographies out there are fascinating, how many times do we really need to go over that stuff? As someone who is just as interested in the process as I am in the final product, I loved reading about what went into making each album, especially the ones that aren't talked about as often (a glaringly obvious example being the internet-only release, not.com.mercial).

What was odd to me was the lapse in editing that seemed to plague the first part of this book. There were various cases of not getting song titles ("Take Me Out" rather than "Take Me Home") or album titles (Bittersweet White Light was at one point referred to as Bittersweet Bright Light) right, at one point the Half-Breed album was mistaken for the Dark Lady album. Perhaps it's nitpicking on my part, but it happened frequently enough to take me out of the book from time to time, and it was frustrating because they were errors that could have easily been fixed before publication. The second half more than made up for it, though, and overall I have to give a rating based on the content rather than the editing.

[Gary Myers · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enjoyable book about an interesting life.