The long-awaited memoir by Cameron Crowe—one of America’s most iconic journalists and filmmakers—is a joyful dispatch from a lost world, a chronicle of the real-life events that became Almost Famous, and a coming-of-age journey filled with music legends as you’ve never seen them before.
Crowe’s charming new memoir is an elegy for a lost time and place ... As he does so often in this book, Crowe pulls the reader in with his keenly observant eye ... Reminds us of what has been lost, the myths and mystique that fueled our rock star fantasies and gave the music an aura of magic.
One of the greatest tricks cool people play on the rest of us is convincing us in their memoirs that they were and are profoundly uncool ... The book reads like a novelization of [Almost Famous], so much so that it makes you consider the nature of memory. I’m not suggesting Crowe is making things up in this memoir. I’m merely suggesting that the stories he wrote for the movie may have been so reverberant that they began to subtly bleed into his own ... There is little that’s grainy or truly revelatory about his own life and loves. The book ends before his directing career has begun, thus leaving room for a sequel. Everything is a bit gauzy, soft-core. God help me, I read this book quickly and enjoyed it anyway.
Captures an extraordinarily inventive period in which rock music was stretching out in all directions ... While his journalistic ethics may have wilted in the megawatt glow of his favourite rock stars, Crowe’s writing style flourished. In The Uncool, he succinctly evokes both eccentric characters and the era they represented.
