Customer Reviews

Ordinary Girl: The Journey

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2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

With the recent passing of Whitney Houston, this book came to mind. While we're all asking ourselves how in the world could such a gifted and successful artist like Whitney succumb to the drugs and seemingly non-nrealities of fame, this is a book of a certified superstar who was able to extract herself from the spiral of meaningless attention and find peace and joy in normalcy. It's a great read with this frame of mind.

Take this simple excerpt from the book and you'll begin to see what I mean, "The public life of a singer who is on the charts, as I was at the time, becomes all-consuming and eventually takes everything out of you. If you're not extremely careful, if you don't keep a tight inventory on your own self-worth, you will wind up in some very strange places mentally and physically. That's why so many people in music take drugs or drink. It's their only way to cope, and it either kills them or forces them to look at the reality of their lives. The only way to survive the fame is get control of your perspective on reality, and to do that you have to have a fairly strong frame of reference to the real world. Often it is extremely difficult to know who you ca trust."

To everyone who is trying to come to terms with Whitney's death, or the deaths of other stars such as Michael Jackson or Kurt Cobain, I highly recommend this book. It's not a preachy self-help, but that's sort of the whole point. It's a basic story of someone who was at the top, yet chose to step down to live a real life.

Kudos to Donna Summer. Not only did she save her own life by choosing normalcy, she also preserved her own God-given gift, and still continues to share it with her fans many years later. She's always been my favorite diva, but not because she is a "Bad Girl." It's simply because she's extraordinarily gifted, yet ordinary at heart.

For people who are even nominally familiar with her name, Donna Summer is the Queen of Disco. Critically acclaimed as the only true artist from that musical genre, she left behind the many one-hit wonders and continued a career for the next couple of decades.

So how disappointing is this book that is a highly personal look at her faith but says little about her music. The first couple of chapters are interesting, outlining her family background and her almost hippie past in German stage productions like HAIR, but she gives her biggest collaborator, Giorgio Moroder a light dust-over. This is the man who produced and co-wrote many of her biggest hits. This is also the guy who said that in disco, the producer is the absolute dictator! Surely there are stories to be told about working with him and Pete Bellotte for so many years. Surely there were stories when she split with Moroder to work with other producers.

It becomes very clear that Summer has avoided dissing the living. She spends some interesting chapters looking at her love/hate relationship with Casablanca Records president, Neil Bogart, but he's dead. Meanwhile, she carefully and diplomatically mentions David Geffen but she glances over her well-documented turbulent years with Geffen Records. That omission is testament to Geffen's continued clout. (Summer fans may recall her thank-you notes in CATS WITHOUT CLAWS which thanked Geffen for 'staying out of the kitchen this time'.)

Like other reviewers have noted, she also barely mentions the urban legend that she became homophobic when she became a Born-Again Christian. True or false? Where else but in her biography could she have either talked about her reaction or how she felt about the boycott against her music which effectively blockaded her work for much of the 1980s?

But forgetting about the scandals and sizzle of her career, ultimately it is the music that gets shortchanged here. She does not mention one of her biggest hits, "Hot Stuff". She does not mention her immediate post-Born-Again decision not to ever sing her more provocative material and why she reversed that decision. And as the Queen of Disco, she has the unique perspective to talk about the music, its impact and its endurance. Even her critically-acclaimed THE WANDERER is barely mentioned here - and that was a record that John Lennon loved and that tried to move her away from disco into rock - the kind of dance/rock fusion that she had pioneered with "Hot Stuff".

If she had any comments about her disco stereotyping, the state of dance music or how easy/difficult it was to be a female pop star in the music industry, she doesn't say here. Oddly enough, at the back of the book is her discography and it too is glaring in its omissions. She includes forgettable soundtracks like THE DEEP and FOXES but overlooks her hits with FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMOUNT HIGH and FLASHDANCE. Her many officially sanctioned greatest hits are also MIA - THE DONNA SUMMER ANTHOLOGY being the biggest one. Perhaps she was embarrassed to list them all?

Overall, ORDINARY GIRL is a disappointing peek at a fabulous life and career. There's some selective amnesia going on so for anyone looking for the definitive look at the career of Donna Summer, this book is only 60 percent there.

I agree with the reviews of many posters that this is an extremely disappointing book. As I began reading it, I wondered why she was spending an exponential amount of time in the beginning of the book discussing very mundane and insignificant events in her childhood. It would make sense to do this if these accounts offered meaningful insights about the impact that these events had on her later in life, but they do not. As I continued reading the book, I was struck by Donna's omission of important events in her career and life, most importantly her feelings about her place in the disco era, her struggles to maintain a place at the top of the charts, as well as more details on the impact of fame on her life during the disco days. Instead she spent a lot of time talking about cooking with Sophia Loren, her garden, moving to Nashville, and her struggles with her boyfriends and husband. Although these accounts may be the kinds of things Martha Stewart's fans may want to read, they certainly are not what the fans of the Queen of Disco want to read. The book, quite simply, left me feeling hungry, unfulfilled, dissatisfied, and empty.

What I really wanted from this book, and what I did not get, was a detailed account of the disco era that defined the 70's and Donna's place in it, her experiences during that time, her feelings about her successes and winning Grammy awards, her relationships with other artists during that exciting time, her feelings about the challenges she faced staying at the top of the charts, her experiences with record companies, her musical experiences during the 80's and 90's when she was no longer on top, and the resurgence she is experiencing now.

Many of these important issues are touched on in only a few lines. I believe these are issues that Donna's fans really want to hear about. For those of us who lived through the wonderful and exciting Disco era, a more detailed account on the events of her life within this context would have been an interesting read.

I hate to say it but I believe Josiah Howard's biography is much better than this autiobiography. I was very bored reading Donna's book but very intrigued whilst reading Howard's book.

Donna Summer has had one of the most interesting careers in pop music. She came to fame with a novelty hit ("Love To Love You Baby") but later hits like "Last Dance" and "Dim All The Lights" revealed a singer with a stunning voice and surprisingly good songwriting. The tag of "Queen of Disco" never prevented Summer from becoming a major pop star.

But by the 80s, and the death of disco, Summer's career took a downward turn. She became a Born Again Christian and was accused of homophobia for alleged comments she made after a concert in the early 80s. She joined Geffen records and her tenure under David Geffen led to uneven work and middling chart performances.

This would all be excellent fodder for her autobiography, but Summer refuses to acknowledge these events in her life. Sure, she talks about being born again, but she doesn't talk about the effect it had on her career or her relationships. She also doesn't discuss (except for one line) that her relationship with her gay fans suffered because of the alleged comments and her being saved. Summer continues to overlook how integral gay men have been to her success, and her inability to discuss this subject only shows her ambivalence towards her gay fans.

This is a boring, dull autobiography that's as uninteresting as some of Summer's worst songs.

What a missed opportunity this book has turned out to be! Although it contains a few (not many) insights into Donna's personal life and beliefs, fans hoping for an examination of her music, creative processes, and working relationships with her collaborators like Giorgio Moroder, will find virtually nothing to satisfy their curiosity. Much of her career, the hits, the good and bad times and the controversies, are only touched on lightly or not even mentioned. With masses of pictures filling out the sparse 246 pages or so, the content of this book is so light I feared it would fly away if I wasn't holding on to it! I guess this is all Donna wants her fans to know about her, but frankly, it just isn't interesting reading. Hopefully some other biographer will write a more informative book about Donna and her music some day.

what has happened? donna summer is an amazing artist, one of my top 10 favorites of all time. She has recorded more than a handful of masterpiece albums...even her last "Mistaken Identity" had one classic track with "WOrk that Magic". Then Donna was gone...there were rumors of a country album, of a comeback album on Sony... And there's been about 1000 greatest hits packages.

Anyhow, I was really disappointed by this book. I know a lot of people have talked about this already...but I honestly feel "The Wanderer" and "I'm a Rainbow" were Summer at her more experimental, vunerable, genuine, and artistic. Barely a mention. C'mon now, the story behind writing the intense "Running for Cover" must be worth a mention. The ultra experimental and innovative "I'm a Rainbow" at least deserved a chapter! What happened to her relationship with Giorgio after Geffen paired her for the eh so/so Quincy Jones album? Was her reunion with Giorgio on 1993's "Carry On" a big event? We will never know apparently.

What happened to the country album?
Is Ordinary Girl going to happen?
Christmas Spirit didn't get a mention either.

The book we did get -- I wouldn't take anything out of it...hearing about the bohemian German days helped me realize what an artistic person Donna is/was. But, oh it's all been said already.

I'm gonna go listen to The Wanderer now.

Two years in the making, and Summer delivers an "autobiography" which reads like she wrote it in an afternoon. I for one, an admitted huge Summer fan for over twenty years, waited with great anticipation for this book's release. After all, Summer is a gifted entertainer; an admirable songwriter (for herself and others), a hit recording artist (she holds the 'record' for many Billboard categories which haven't been broken in the past two decades); and an accomplished painter. "Gifted author", she is not.

Her career has been a hodgepodge of triumphs and tragedies, both personal and profesional. She has crossed paths in her career with some of the 'greats' - including Streisand and Springsteen, among many others in the music industry. Still, one would never know this from her book.

Summer triumphed to superstardom in the 70s, with the advent of the 'disco era' (which has successfully spun off today's 'dance' and 'club' genres), yet endured her slate of disappointments (her much publicicized split with Casablanca Records in 1980). This she does discuss to some degree, in the first two-thirds of her 'thin' book. Yet, the 80s and 90s were not too good for Summer professionally (her split with Geffen Records, her lawsuit against a tabloid for the infamous 'AIDS' rumour, her fall from radio playlists, an endless search for her new label, her more recent subsequent split with Sony Music; this - nearly two decades of her career - is hardly mentioned at all. Even her much-discussed Broadway musical (some five years in the making and at an indefinite halt, according to other sources) barely gets covered. She talks about her preparation of it, but not what's keeping it off the stage (is it lack of funding? is it subject matter?). Her duet with Streisand is four pages of nothing more than adoration ("I think she's great!" Summer coos), but no mention of when she covered for Streisand at the 1984 Oscars (isn't that a memorable event worth writing about?), or if there's a friendship between the two today. Same with Springsteen (who worked on her 1982 album); a bit of cooing and nothing else.

What we do know is her religious beliefs (admittedly, she doesn't over-do it with religion, and what she does discuss flows evenly through the book), and what a great parent she is to her three kids (at times it makes the reader embarassed for her lack of humility in this matter).

This won't go down in history as the worst autobiography from a musical diva (that disinction goes to Diana Ross for 1993's "Secrets of a Sparrow"), but it comes awfully close.

I rushed out and bought this book, since I am a very avid fan of Donna Summer. There is simply no finer voice in the pop music world. However, for those of us who are drawn to her musically, this book is sorely lacking in detail. I enjoyed the insights into her personal life, but I would have loved to have read about her creative process, her experience with the various producers she's worked with, and how she's managed to keep her audience interested over a 28 year career span. [] Also, the website mentioned on the inside back cover flap is still under construction....what gives? Your fans deserve better, Donna!

I have been looking forward to a Donna Summer biography for years. I have been a fan of the singer's since 1975 and have every LP, cassette, video, CD, and DVD that she made. Through the years I have always thought of Summer as an exceptional singer, an average song writer, and a mediocre (at best) performer. I had the opinion that she was full of herself and has made some dumb mistakes in her life (as we all do). It was her music that transcended everything else and for that I loved her. She did trail blaze and some of her recordings are still some of the best around.

I had hopes with this book that Donna Summer would tell an interesting, insightful and truthful story of her life. I had hoped that her highly self-touted Christianity would humble her into telling a poignant story. Although there are some moments when you do see some of her refreshing vulnerability, overall it is a boring, contradictory, self-absorbed, sometimes preachy read.
The writing is some of the worst I have read. It is poorly structured, confusing, and bland. For example, there were many times that I was led to believe that her lover, Gunther, was no longer in her life, only to find out chapters later that he was still around.
My biggest problem with this book is that there is no true reference of her rise in the disco era and all that surrounded it. I know that she does not want to be known ultimately as the Queen of Disco (a term which she barely talks about) but disco made her the star she is today, regardless of her successful break from it. There is no detail given of how many of her songs came to be. The whole era is somewhat glossed over. What a disappointment.
And the final reason why I cannot recommend this book is her virtual elimination of two things; homosexuals and AIDS. She mentions it briefly in a sentence "A rumor was printed that I was homophobic." That's it. She still doesn't acknowledge that the gay audience ignited her career. She doesn't address the banning of her music for years in gay clubs for her alleged comment that AIDS was sent as God's wrath on homosexuals, which she denies she ever made. Maybe we will get truth to the scandal? Not here.
And she never speaks of her estranged relationship with Paul Jabara. Jabara wrote "Last Dance" and "Enough is Enough" -- two of her biggest hits. He was gay and Summer turned her back on him because of her Christian beliefs. Or did she? With this book, we assume she did because she never mentions it and barely talks of their relationship. Jabara died of AIDS after writing a song for Summer to sing to "come clean" with the gay community --that's the story anyway, and with this book, I am still left in the dark. She also never mentions Jabara's name in her long list of thank you's at the end of the book. That is one statement she does make. Shame on you Ms. Summer.

I think Donna's intention here (as the title implies) was to point out, that despite her extraordinary rise to stardom, she's just an "Ordinary Girl" who happened to make it big. Never once does she come off as privileged or entitled, but instead she tells her story with great humility and gratitude for the gifts, talents, and opportunities she's been given.

As for all the criticism regarding her "breezing over" alleged remarks she made against homosexuals, what more can be said? How many times would you like her to reiterate something that happened two decades ago. Accept it or reject it, but for crying out loud get over it already! This book is supposed to be about the artist, her life and music. It wasn't intended to be a 255-page apology letter to the gay community.

That said, if you're looking for scandal or mud-slinging here, forget it. But if your interested in an engaging account of Donna Summer's life, then this book is for you. A great read!!!