Yay or Nay? Yay! (78%)

 

Consensus: A well-written and insightful memoir without being scandalous in the process.

Genres: Arts & Literature | Biographies & Memoirs | Entertainment | Memoirs | Music | Non-fiction | Specific Group Bios

Description: A candid and moving memoir from the critically acclaimed singer and songwriter.
 
For thirty years as a musician, Rosanne Cash has enjoyed both critical and commercial success, releasing a series of albums that are as notable for their lyrical intelligence as for their musical excellence.
 
Now, in her memoir, Cash writes compellingly about her upbringing in Southern California as the child of country legend Johnny Cash, and of her relationships with her mother and her famous stepmother, June Carter Cash. In her account of her development as an artist she shares memories of a hilarious stint as a twenty-year-old working for Columbia Records in London; recording her own first album on a German label; working her way to success; her marriage to Rodney Crowell, a union that made them Nashville’s premier couple; her relationship with the country music establishment; taking a new direction in her music and leaving Nashville to move to New York; motherhood; dealing with the deaths of her parents, in part through music; the process of songwriting; and the fulfillment she has found with her current husband and musical collaborator, John Leventhal.
 
Cash has written an unconventional and compelling memoir that, in the tradition of M. F. K. Fisher’s “The Gastronomical Me Stop-Time,” is a series of linked pieces that combine to form a luminous and brilliant whole. … [more]

Shop online for “Composed: A Memoir” by Rosanne Cash:

10 Book Reviews for “Composed: A Memoir” by Rosanne Cash

• Cash delivers writerly meditations on what it means to be an artist and a public person and, yes, a daughter. Rare is the celebrity memoir that is so full of self-awareness and dignity.
  Published the 28th day of July, 2010 in Entertainment Weekly | Reviewed by Karen Valby | Full Review
  
• The result feels like a song with tremendous potential, albeit one that’s frustratingly incomplete.
  Published the 4th day of August, 2010 in The Star Telegram | Reviewed by Preston Jones | Full Review
  
• Rosanne Cash isn’t just a writer and performer of songs, she’s a writer, period…. Amen to that, and amen as well to this beautiful and stirring book, of which one thing can be said for sure: Dad would have been proud of it, and her.
  Published the 8th day of August, 2010 in The Washington Post | Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley | Full Review
  
• Cash’s Composed has higher aspirations; it’s more a loving, reflective portrait than tawdry tell-all…. But from all of that pain, Cash has conjured a carefully honed celebrity document that elevates the craft.
  Published the 15th day of August, 2010 in Miami Herald | Reviewed by Howard Cohen | Full Review
  
• Some of the best writing in “Composed” is the eulogies she delivered for her stepmother, her father and her mother.
  Published the 14th day of August, 2010 in The Oregonian | Reviewed by Jeff Baker | Full Review
  
• “Composed” is a pointillistic memoir about growing up with and without her father, and about how she slid out from under his shadow to become a gifted artist in her own right…. The bad news about “Composed” is that its title fits too well…. Well, I did not find “Composed” to be the most arresting book in the world. Ms. Cash’s memoirs are clearly a work in progress, however. (This book’s final sentence is “More to come.”) If her writing career is going to unfold like her musical one, I suspect she’s only beginning to find her voice.
  Published the 10th day of August, 2010 in The New York Times | Reviewed by Dwight Garner | Full Review
  
• But the facts of Cash’s extraordinary life do not a self-portrait make, and it’s the author’s weaving of history and experience with a deep sense of reflection, at once clear-eyed and nearly impressionistic, that makes “Composed” such a pleasure to read.
  Published the 11th day of August, 2010 in The Boston Globe | Reviewed by Joan Anderman | Full Review
  
• With this thoughtful memoir, she reveals how she managed it all and in the doing wrote her own distinctive chapter in the Cash legacy.
  Published the 22nd day of August, 2010 in Chicago Sun-Times | Reviewed by Mary Houlihan | Full Review
  
• Composed does more than tell a life story beautifully. It begs us to pay attention to our lives, suggests we decide which life events will serve as recurring themes or templates of meaning and which we might do better to simply release as isolated incidents, nothing to fret over. It reminds us that if we keep working, even as we worry ,we can see that our lives are full of poetry, too. And then, so too, can we ‘extend the poetry’ to the world outside, to the end of our days.
  Published the 12th day of August, 2010 in The Globe and Mail | Reviewed by Madonna Hamel | Full Review
  
• Johnny Cash’s daughter, a star in her own right, is revealing and honest without being salacious in her new memoir.
  Published the 25th day of August, 2010 in Los Angeles Times | Reviewed by Randy Lewis | Full Review
  

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This entry was posted on Friday, August 27th, 2010 at 2:38 PM and is filed under:
Arts & Literature, Biographies & Memoirs, Entertainment, Memoirs, Music, Non-fiction, Specific Group Bios.

Tags: book review, Chicago Sun-Times, Composed, Dwight Garner, Entertainment Weekly, Howard Cohen, Jeff Baker, Joan Anderman, Jonathan Yardley, Karen Valby, literary criticism, Los Angeles Times, Madonna Hamel, Mary Houlihan, Miami Herald, Preston Jones, Randy Lewis, Rosanne Cash, The Boston Globe, The Globe and Mail, The New York Times, The Oregonian, The Star Telegram, The Washington Post

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