Bruce Springsteen's America : The People Listening, a Poet Singing

Rating:
Summary: I wish I were blind
Review: "I wish I were blind" is the name of a Springsteen song but it's also what readers of this inane drivel will be screaming within the first couple of chapters. I'm in my mid-40s, a writer and editor with book publishing experience, as well as a long-time, diehard Springsteen fan, so I hope the author and publisher will permit me some credit here for having at least a modicum of authority in declaring this book thoroughly unreadable. I've yet to finish 100 pages and I have already surrendered. The first two chapters--some 50 pages--ramble on as the author clumsily attempts to establish a connection between Walt Whitman, Frank Sinatra, Dorothea Lange, and the poet William Carlos Williams, about whom Coles delights in reminding us constantly, through interminable and meaningless quotations, was a personal friend. Why does he do this? Because they were all from New Jersey, a fact worthy of about a paragraph unless the topic of the your book is "Famous Artists from the Garden State." Worse, the author chooses to convey this information through pages-long transcripts of tape-recordings. I found myself reading some sentences three and four times trying futility to derive some understanding from the rambling babble of the author's interviewees, which seems to have been copied onto the page verbatim with little or no concern as to whether the words are actually related to the topic at hand. Early on, Coles quite obviously reveals himself to be of a much older generation and unfamiliar with Springsteen and popular music when he refers to a fan listening to "this guy they call The Boss" on "an electronic disc-playing gadget." Welcome to the '80s, Dr. Coles. They're called CD players. Coles even has the blood-curdling audacity to include a poem of his own about the connection he perceives between WCW and Springsteen, a shoddy and amateurish effort that serves only to embarrass both men, not to mention its author. I don't blame Coles for this journalistic travesty so much as I blame the publisher, Random House. They took an inferior work, slapped a photo of Springsteen on the cover, and mislead potential buyers in the jacket promo by claiming that this book is a deep and meaningful look at Springsteen's lyrics as understood by his fans. It's nothing of the kind and Random House owes, at minimum, an apology (if not a refund) to people like me who were duped into dropping $25 on this soon-to-be-remaindered abomination. Perhaps this book's single redeeming value is that it provides irrefutable proof that an elderly pediatrician has about as much business writing about Springsteen's poetry as Dave Marsh has taking a kid's rectal temperature.

Rating:
Summary: Impressionistic Method, Wrong Title
Review: An interesting book with a number of weaknesses and a clearly wrong title. This book should've been titled "America's Bruce Springsteen" and not the other way around because it is all about how Americans from "all walks of life" (let's assume that to be true for a second) have assimilated Springsteen's music and poetry into their own lives and made them their own. This book is not about how BS creates the American psyche but how the Americans created the "Boss" and transferred all their hopes and dreams into him, lived through him vicarously just like a generation before them did the same to Elvis and many other popular icons of their day.

The first few chapters rambling at length about the romance of New Jersey, Frank Sinatra, Dorothea Lange and William Carlos Williams do not prepare the reader well for the main body of the book, which consists of the oral testimonies of Americans with different backgrounds on how they've made the Boss a part of their daily lives, how they found the meaning of their lives in his music and words. In short, how the Boss replaced the therapist and perhaps cost them a lot less as well.

Especially disappointing was the long section on the acclaimed novelist Walker Percy and his adulation of the Boss. After digressing at length about Percy's idolization of Springsteen as the new secular prophet of the American soul, we are sucker punched to learn that Percy has actually "never had a chance to see and hear Bruce Springsteen sing, talk, play the guitar." Hello?! So why does the author build up Percy as an authority on Springsteen? Just like his previous references to Sinatra and Williams, this reference also fails to explain why BS became the mass phenomenon that he is today.

The author admits the true nature of his book on page 45: "... what this book is meant to offer: not biography, and not musicology, but a kind of ethnography -- stories some listeners told to me..."

The following testimonies of a schoolteacher, a lawyer, a truck driver, a cop, a businessman, a grandmother, etc. are all very interesting and a pleasure to read. But they are not enough to bridge the series gap in analysis.

For example I wish the author did bravely go into the dangerous territory of Springsteen's appeal to a specific kind of popular nationalism in songs like "Born in the U.S.A." in an era when jobs from smalltown America were (and unfortunately still are) being outsourced to Asia and Latin America, and new generations of immigrants were (and still are) building their own prosperous American Dreams while some of us who have been here for a century and more are sliding down the slippery slope to unemployment, bankruptcy and welfare. Without such a sociological analysis of the kind of troubled constituency the Boss specifically appeals to, just mere "ethnography" is too weak and impressionistic an approach to understand the amazing rise of Bruce Springsteen to the status our new Workingmen's Troubadour.

Rating:
Summary: Don't Bother
Review: I don't know what this book was supposed to be, but reading about how someone argues with his wife using Bruce Springsteen's lyrics is a waste of paper.

Rating:
Summary: endless drivel from someone who doesn't know Bruce.......
Review: I opened this book with the expectation that the author would take us on a journey of Springsteen's lyrical talent, only to discover that Robert Coles truly does not appreciate what Bruce is giving to people. Instead, he focuses on himself, talks about people he knows who bear no connection to Bruce, even includes an inane poem that he wrote in honor of Springsteen and a person he knew: "Dr. Williams", that he somehow sees a connection to. I wish I had researched this author more...... I would have seen that he's published more than 50 books, and that this book is clearly just a marketing move. That old caveat is true "Don't judge a book by its cover"; I would add to that: "or its title!"

Rating:
Summary: Little insight into Springsteen's importance
Review: I picked this up thinking that the idea of looking at Bruce through the eyes of different Americans would be a unique perspective on Bruce's legacy. There is very little insight here, and the result is very disappointing. As someone who has been affected greatly and thought deeply about Bruce's music, I couldn't even finish reading it.

Here are the criticisms of what I did read:
* Superficial commentary on songs worthy of great comment
* Very poor editing: I think Coles just transcribed his interviewees stories directly from tape without editing. It's like one big run-on sentence. It is choppy and totally unlyrical. Frankly, it hurts my eyes!
* Some of the people aren't even Bruce fans. They are acquainted with Bruce fans or have observed the impact of Bruce on America without participating in it and experiencing it. It's like asking people in China to comment on what baseball means to America.

Rating:
Summary: Fact or Fiction?
Review: I should have listened to my first instinct not to get this book when I noted a Harvard child psychiatrist wrote it. But when you're a fan you suspend disbelief in order to hear what other "average Americans" have to say about Springsteen's work. I agree with one reviewer, Coles book sounds like Cole writing what he thinks common folk think about Springsteen's songs. Either that or he has worked with the people featured in the book so much, they have taken on his voice. I finished the book not out of fascination for what the people said (some of their insights and observations had me wondering if they really listened to the music or perhaps took some bad college literature classes), but out of what seemed strange similarities between the interviewees. They are purportedly from different walks of life and parts of the country, and yet, if you read through, you will find they have similar ways of phrasing ideas, ways of speaking they hold in common (that are not in keeping with how most people speak), and similar rhythms to their speech. It had the feel of coming from the same Harvard educated author and not interviews of different "common folk". I'm not going to accuse Coles of fabrication, rather of embellishing the stories (heavily) with his voice and his ideas. Beyond the question of authenticity, the interpretations and visions of Springsteen's songs in this book are soulless in my opinion. They do a poor job of exploring the teenage angst of his earlier work, the worker/adulthood angst in later work, and the angst of his favorite topic - societal misfits and deviant's. When one of the interviewees in the book states that the songs Nebraska and Johnny 99 are trying to get you to feel sorry for the main characters - it goes to show how far off the mark the interviewee and Coles are.

Rating:
Summary: Fact or Fiction?
Review: I should have listened to my first instinct not to get this book when I noted a Harvard child psychiatrist wrote it. But when you're a fan you suspend disbelief in order to hear what other "average Americans" have to say about Springsteen's work. I agree with one reviewer, Coles book sounds like Cole writing what he thinks common folk think about Springsteen's songs. Either that or he has worked with the people featured in the book so much, they have taken on his voice. I finished the book not out of fascination for what the people said (some of their insights and observations had me wondering if they really listened to the music or perhaps took some bad college literature classes), but out of what seemed strange similarities between the interviewees. They are purportedly from different walks of life and parts of the country, and yet, if you read through, you will find they have similar ways of phrasing ideas, ways of speaking they hold in common (that are not in keeping with how most people speak), and similar rhythms to their speech. It had the feel of coming from the same Harvard educated author and not interviews of different "common folk". I'm not going to accuse Coles of fabrication, rather of embellishing the stories (heavily) with his voice and his ideas. Beyond the question of authenticity, the interpretations and visions of Springsteen's songs in this book are soulless in my opinion. They do a poor job of exploring the teenage angst of his earlier work, the worker/adulthood angst in later work, and the angst of his favorite topic - societal misfits and deviant's. When one of the interviewees in the book states that the songs Nebraska and Johnny 99 are trying to get you to feel sorry for the main characters - it goes to show how far off the mark the interviewee and Coles are.

Rating:
Summary: Born to Run -- far away from this book!
Review: My god, this book is awful. How can a "celebrated Harvard professor and Pulitzer Prize-winning author" write such a pretentious, embarassing, ridiculous, overwrought, narcissistic/self-centered, rambling, poorly edited (was it edited at all?), unreadable piece of drivel? Perhaps Coles was looking to cash in on the popularity of "this guy they call 'The Boss,'" or perhaps he was trying to get away from his Harvard ivory tower and slum it for a bit with a few "average Americans," showing what a down-to-earth guy he really is? Unfortunately, those "average Americans'" comments and thoughts, as presented here by Robert Coles, end up as little more than incoherent ramblings which shed no light and provide little if any insight into Springsteen the man or the artist. Is this why Springsteen tries so hard to control what gets written and said about him? So that books like this don't ever get written? My advice to any Springsteen fans (or anyone else) out there thinking about buying this book: you were Born to Run -- far away from this godawful book!

Rating:
Summary: I wish I were blind
Review: This book has an attractive cover. It has a mildly interesting introduction. But that's it. The balance of the book reads as if the author, with oh, perhaps five days to produce this work rounded up a bunch of fans, let them babble about what Bruce's music has meant to them, asked someone to transcribe the narratives, added a few uninsightful comments, and called it a book. How sad. How lazy. The book adds virtually nothing to the studies of this legendary artist. I bemoan the Bruce fans who received this book as a holiday gift from well-intentioned relatives. I weep for the trees that were sacrificed to produce it. And the real tragedy -- and irony -- is that apiring artists (as Bruce once was) find it nearly impossible to attract notice in significant measure because publishers would rather bank on authors such as Coles who have outstanding academic credentials and a publishing "track record," even if the egotistical trash they now produce wouldn't pass muster in any decent college English class. If you already own this book, I suggest sending it back to Coles, annotated with a big red "F -- try again." And if you don't already own it, take the money you considered using to buy this book and give it to a local food bank. And if you're Robert Coles, you ought to be ashamed of yourself.

Rating:
Summary: Springsteen Speaks to Us All
Review: Well, I liked it. After years of listening to Bruce's music, if not paying sufficient attention to the lyrics, the book helps me grok his lyrics in ways that move me, occasionally to tears.

My guess is that Coles' collection of impressions will resonant with everyman and everywoman, if not Springsteen fans who find themselves already there and academics who need...what?

Some of the interviews do ramble. Yet, the ancients must have gathered and babbled long ago and will forevermore around story-tellers.

I bet Coles' work will eventually be recognized as a significant contribution to helping us understand ourselves as Americans through this collection of tales from the trenches where ordinary people seek hope and love and voice....