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Rating: 
Summary: Nothing new here.
Review: As a life long R.E.M. fan i was delighted to see an autobiography finally being published on the greatest band ever! Of course its an unofficial one(Warning Bells!). The early years are interesting enough and was pretty happy with the book. What happened was when the book progresed into the 90's, when i had become a fan, it seemed i had read nearly anything that this book had to say in a magazine or review already. There was no startling revelations or anything that wasn't already known to the average fan in this book.It would be a great read for new R.E.M. fans as it is packed with all the history and background to the music etc.The Author does a good job on putting all this together. The book needed to ne written by R.E.M. themselves and no-one else. I wanted to see R.E.M. through the eyes of R.E.M. and not a writer i guess!
Rating: 
Summary: Nice change from the other R.E.M. bios.
Review: I thought this book was pretty refreshing because it contains a lot of interviews with Athens scenesters who knew the band way back when and other important figures in R.E.M.'s history (like early producer Mitch Easter). That makes it unique among most of the other biographies out there. I own a copy of pretty much every book ever written on R.E.M. and this one stands out with some of the better ones in my collection. It's well written and David Buckley has done a good job collecting his info. There are so many great stories from Peter in this book, too. Peter is one of the greatest storytellers in rock and I never tire of hearing his anecdotes. Yes, he didn't get to talk to Michael but I don't think that really detracts much from the overall intrigue of the book based on what I mentioned about all the unique interviewees that have contributed. It also covers a lot of recent R.E.M. history, which most R.E.M. bios don't, since most haven't had new editions published. Definitely pick it up if you've already got some of the other, more recommended bios on R.E.M.
Rating:
Summary: Nothing new here!
Review: I'm a life long R.E.M. fan and i was really excited about buying the new david buckley autobiography on them.The book starts out with all the background to their lives,surroundings and formation.Its all well documented and detailed in the book.Peter Bucks interviews are always witty and intelligent and he seems to have had the largest imput into the book out of the original four.
Michael Stipe is R.E.M.'s heart and buckley never got to talk to him, everything he's quoted as saying ive read before in a magazine!! A lot of the content i have already seen in a magazine or an interview.This kinda kills the book for me, i was going over all the same stuff again. No secrets are found out in here.Guess thats just because the band are really private anyway!.
The albums are all well detailed and some of the hardships in dealing ith touring, producers etc are all informative. The book is a great read for a semi-R.E.M. fan but the ones who've followed them religously since the late 80's its very boring.
Hopefully in time a real biography will come out penned by michael stipe to see what raelly inspired and drove the greatest band ever!
Rating:
Summary: Raises the question of writing email interviews
Review: The author has obviously used email to interview people, and the result is a text that twists from one tone to anther. In an early single page, the voice goes from chippy ("And I said, ' Pete, let's play sometime, I'll play my bass and you play your guitar,' and Pete said, 'No, I'm not going to play with anybody until it's serious' and you know, it worked out for him!") to impressionistic ("...as writer Geoff Ward remembers: ' Green. Trailing green. Miles and miles of it, between Atlanta (where our plane touched down) and Athens, Georgia.' ")
In a face-to-face or even telephone interview, I suspect the writer would have quoted only the important parts of an interview, leaving out, for instance, the parentheses in the latter quote above, or the word "Georgia" at the end of the quote (as he has referred to Athens already many times).
Perhaps he thought that, because text came to him in a paragraph form, he had no right to be selective in his editing. Perhaps readers feel the same way.
In either case, for me the interviews had the effect of hijacking the writer's book and robbing the reader of any feeling of flow over the course of the narrative.
Rating:
Summary: he air brushed my band
Review: This book is not particularily revealing. "It Crawled From the South" has the same info. and is better, more objectively written. The author uses too many cliches like "...cutting his teeth on..." and writes such awkward gems like: Peter's friend, " a student called, Kathleen O'Brien..."
A photo from the Green era is incorrectly identified as being from their "breakthrough" year of 1991.
Rating:
Summary: he air brushed my band
Review: This book is not particularily revealing. "It Crawled From the South" has the same info. and is better, more objectively written. The author uses too many cliches like "...cutting his teeth on..." and writes such awkward gems like: Peter's friend, " a student called, Kathleen O'Brien..."
A photo from the Green era is incorrectly identified as being from their "breakthrough" year of 1991.
Rating:
Summary: he air brushed my band
Review: This book is not particularily revealing. "It Crawled From the South" has the same info. and is better, more objectively written. The author uses too many cliches like "...cutting his teeth on..." and writes such awkward gems like: Peter's friend, " a student called, Kathleen O'Brien..."
A photo from the Green era is incorrectly identified as being from their "breakthrough" year of 1991.
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