Customer Reviews

Neil Diamond

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

As a Neil Diamond impersonator who has spent thousands of hours researching Neil's life through written documents and pictures, I thought I'd seen everything available on the great legend. Wrong! Diana Karanikas Harvey and Jackson Harvey offer even the most diehard Neil Diamond fan facts and pictoral documentation that they won't find anywhere else. Beginning with Neil's birth in Brooklyn, this fascinating and indepth book details all aspects of Neil's life - personal and professional- right up to the present day. Even the most diehard fans, who think they've read and seen everything about "The Jazz Singer", will discover something either in picture or text that will pique their interest and add to their knowledge of Neil Diamond. Tom Sadge, March 19, 1999

This book is an amazing work of art. It is a great history of an amazing person and a unbelievable performer. Biographical information is thoroughly intriguing in addition to the book's many other impressive features. Even if you don't consider yourself a Neil Diamond fan, I highly recommend this one. Truly an awesome tribute to a living legend.

this book is full of pictures and loaded with info on neil.

This is a must for all Neil Diamond fans! I could not put it down. It has great pictures and the articles are well written.I hope that the author updates it before too long but for fans and others wanting to more about this private star this will help answer many of your questions.

I love this book, it's even better than I expected! It's very well written, and filled with tons of great pictures! I learned alot about him that I didn't know, making my appreciation for him and his music even greater.

The photos are quite good, really excellent quality. Many of them are cropped to show just faces (you can often find the full versions of these photos online). Even though these cropped pictures are enlarged, they are not grainy in the least. The detail is lovely. My only qualm is that some of the 1970s photos have that familiar pink tint to them from age, and I would have liked to see those restored to a more natural color before being included.

By all rights I should have given this book one star for plagiarism; chunks of information from both Rich Wiseman's Solitary Star and Diamond: A Biography by Grossman et al. are used in this book. Entire swaths of Wiseman's book are used almost verbatim, especially during the chapter dealing with Neil's divorce from Jaye and marriage to Marcia. Reading this book immediately after Solitary Star makes this issue blindingly obvious. This book takes so much from other sources that it even repeats their errors, except for one curious change: The dates are not the same. Since this book very clearly used Solitary Star and Diamond: A Biography as sources, and given that plenty of these dates are easily verifiable (the dates he appeared on The Clay Cole Show, the date of his second marriage, his son's birth, etc.) there is no reason for the dates to be wrong, but they are consistently wrong to the point of distraction. Also, Diamond: A Biography mistakenly claims that the spinal tumor Diamond suffered from in 1979 was cancerous, so this book simply repeats the error because no one involved bothered to check sources. (A quick look at an easily-available People article from 1982 would have cleared the mistake up.)

Everything is given a ridiculously positive spin, often done deliberately to counter what has been written in previous books, and usually overdone with flowery rhetoric such as "blissful" and "flawless," "awe-inspiring" and "the most wonderful thing" punctuated with just a few too many exclamation points to be taken seriously.

Ultimately, for a coffee table book there are too few photos, and for a true biography there are too many mistakes. I can't really recommend this book.

I love this book, it's even better than I expected! It's very well written, and filled with tons of great pictures! I learned alot about him that I didn't know, making my appreciation for him and his music even greater.

i hope one day the book, will catch up with me. i am new at buying on line. this is the first item i never got. i have now moved. thank you for your time barbara.

i hope one day the book, will catch up with me. i am new at buying on line. this is the first item i never got. i have now moved. thank you for your time barbara.