Neil Young

June 1, 2010
Voyageur Press books always look like a million bucks, and this coffee-table career biography of enduring sixties rock star Young is no exception. Even the dullest old snapshot of kid Neils family or his first band lushly glows from matte pages as if printed on silk. And those pages! Seldom allowed to be merely white, they are colored and loosely patterned when not entirely filled by a photo. As rock photo books emphasizing the subject, not the photographer(s), go, this is a honey. The text, though, while grammatically sound (save a misplaced modifier or two) and informative enough about Youngs professional peregrinations (literal: he has been known to change course and flee halfway through a concert) and associations, is rife with pop-music boilerplate and more than a little repetitious. Indeed, it sometimes seems that Durchholz and Graff each wrote up the same thing, didnt notice, and ran both versions, sometimes on facing pages. Ah, so what? Nobody will read it like a novel, and scads will love browsing it.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)