Alice Echols is a historian and cultural critic. She has taught at UCLA, USC, and Occidental College and has written for The Nation, The Village Voice, and L.A. Weekly. She lives in Los Angeles.
"A richly detailed portrait. Echols stares unflinchingly at the fault lines of the '60s counter-culture." --Susie Linfield, Los Angeles Times "This Life's a real Pearl." --Bob Gulla, People "A serious biography-it does the important stuff well." --Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post "In Echol's creation Joplin emerges as a true original, compelling, confounding, and rife with contradictions." --Lisa Shea, Elle
This "sociological" biography attempts not only to tell the facts of Joplin's life but to try to understand her in the context of her times. Echols, a historian of the 1960s (Daring To Be Bad: Radical Feminisim in America, 1967-1975, Univ. of Minnesota, 1990) has spent five years researching Joplin and interviewing her friends. She argues that Joplin was a symbol of the postwar good girl breaking the stringent rules of the 1950s and forging her own path and that Joplin's alienation and loneliness belonged to the entire sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll generation. There aren't too many gory details here compared with earlier books (e.g., Myra Friedman's Buried Alive, Harmony, 1992); this is a scholarly look at Joplin and her times. The irony is that the serious, rather stodgy tone is so unlike the singer's persona that Joplin fans may find this hard going. But nothing has been written since Friedman's book, and this is an interesting take on Joplin and the Sixties. Recommended for public and academic libraries.ÄRosellen Brewer, MOBAC Lib. Syst., Monterey, CA
"A richly detailed portrait. Echols stares unflinchingly at the fault lines of the '60s counter-culture." --Susie Linfield, Los Angeles Times "This Life's a real Pearl." --Bob Gulla, People "A serious biography-it does the important stuff well." --Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post "In Echol's creation Joplin emerges as a true original, compelling, confounding, and rife with contradictions." --Lisa Shea, Elle
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