“Hagan has delivered a supple, confident, dispassionately reported and deeply well-written biography. It’s a big book, one that no one will wish longer, but its chapters move past like a crunching collection of singles and not a thumb-sucking double album. It’s a joy to read and feels built to last. Hagan is among those relatively rare biographers who keeps macro and micro in yin-yang balance … Sticky Fingers is about promises and promises betrayed, and about how Wenner’s life — his increasing obsession with fame and a plutocratic lifestyle — reflected both … Come for the essayist in Hagan, stay for the eye-popping details and artful gossip … After Wenner himself, Annie Leibovitz is the most fully realized character in this biography. She comes across as an endearing wild child, sleeping with some of her subjects, abandoning rental cars in haste at airports and becoming, Hagan writes, a ‘full-blown drug addict whose body was, more than once, unceremoniously dumped in front of a hospital by her dealer’ … In scorning Hagan’s work, Wenner’s editorial antennae have failed him. He had the nerve to select a writer and not a hagiographer, and the decision, at the end of his long career, looks good on him.”
–Dwight Garner, The New York Times, October 23, 2017
Read more of Dwight’s reviews here
