I'm Your Man
The Life of Leonard Cohen
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4.0 • 24 Ratings
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
Featuring an intimate chapter reflecting on Leonard's last days, this #1 international bestseller holds its place as the leading biography of Leonard Cohen.
An icon as a writer and musical artist, Leonard Cohen has held fascination and allure for audiences worldwide for decades. He has been one of the most important and influential songwriters of our time, a man of spirituality, emotion, grace, and intelligence, whose work explores the definitive issues of human life—sex, religion, power, meaning, love.
I'm Your Man, the internationally acclaimed and definitive biography of this enigmatic, private, and unassuming man, delves into the many facets and layers of Cohen's life. Award-winning writer Sylvie Simmons draws on Cohen's private archives and a wealth of interviews with his closest associates, his lovers and other muses past and present, with well-known artists whose work he has inspired, and with Cohen himself. Providing depth and perspective not seen before in previous works on Cohen, I'm Your Man balances the creative and personal sides of this fascinating and charismatic figure, whose poetry, novels, and songs have had a profound impact on multiple generations.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this vibrant and enthusiastic chronicle of Leonard Cohen's life, music critic Simmons (Neil Young: Reflections in Broken Glass) draws extensively on interviews with Cohen's friends and associates, as well as on his private archives, his unpublished writings, and his published stories and poetry. The author narrates Cohen's life from his childhood and youth in Montreal where he started writing poetry and stories when he was 15 through his aborted college career to his move to Manhattan in pursuit of music; his rise to fame with such songs as "Suzanne," "Bird on a Wire," and "Hallelujah" (one of pop music's most recorded songs); his often difficult relationships with women; and his search for tranquility and order in his embrace of Buddhism. Carefully weaving the threads of all of his songs and albums through the patterns of his life, Simmons craftily explores the themes that regularly mark Cohen's work: desire, regret, suffering, love, hope, and hamming it up. Cohen emerges from this definitive biography as a sensitive and intensely serious artist whose reverence for the word and deep love and respect for his audiences continues "to dissolve all the boundaries between word and song, between the song and the truth, and the truth and himself, his heart and its aching."
