Lazarus The second coming of David Bowie

Historian Larman (The Windsors at War) explores in this comprehensive account the critically overlooked second half of David Bowie's career. The book opens in the late 1980s, when Bowie was recording albums and touring as a member of the rock band Tin Machine, before releasing a string of solo albums. Though none reached the heights of his 1970s and '80s output, creative partnerships with such producers as Brian Eno helped Bowie go in new directions, from 1999's heavily acoustic Hours to the industrial pop of 2002's Heathens, and eventually return to critical and commercial relevance. After suffering a heart attack on stage in Prague in 2004, Bowie retired from touring and did not release a new album for 12 years; the critically lauded Blackstar came out only two days before his 2016 death. Drawing on a wealth of research, the author highlights the creative challenges faced by a star who was perceived to have "peaked long before... reach the age of forty," and gives due to the "flawed but often brilliant moments" on Bowie's path to reinventing himself. This casts fresh light on the rock star. (Feb.)

The last years of a rock legend's life. The central conceit of this biography is that David Bowie was at his lowest point following two dismally received albums in the late 1980s. He stopped performing his best-loved songs and spent the next three decades in a phoenix-like ascent toward the creation of a new catalog and, in the year before his death from liver cancer at age 69, two masterpieces: the musicalLazarus and his final album,Blackstar. Larman, whose most recent books concern British royalty, doesn't hide his disdain for Bowie's musical output of the early 1990s, particularly the Tin Machine period when Bowie formed a band to record and perform with, and ostensibly to blend into as an equal. He's barely more forgiving of the late-'90s output, when he suggests the ever-restless Bowie was struggling to get his feet on ever-firmer artistic ground. In another context, Larman writes, "The admiration that I, and millions of others…feel for Bowie is inordinate without being unconditional." Some die-hard Bowie fans may be put off by Larman's palpable impatience with Bowie's bouts of "silliness." But most readers will appreciate Larman's mastery of his narrative as it moves with greater force toward its moving climax. Though rock music was his primary medium and the one in which he reached his highest achievements, Bowie was not just a rock star. Often accused of being a dilettante, Bowie was an unquenchably curious and exploratory all-around artist in various media, including painting, video, film, and digital realms, as his ahead-of-the-curve internet project, BowieNet, demonstrated. In this book, he comes across as more and more human, especially as he confronts his worsening health and the numbering of his days. An essential addition to the Bowie bibliography. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.