The bluesy, gutsy, no-holds-barred memoir of jazz legend Billie Holiday.
Billie Holiday was born in 1915. She began singing in jazz clubs in Harlem while still a teenager, never undergoing technical training or even learning to read music. Mainstream success followed with hits like Summertime, Autumn in New York and Strange Fruit. To this day she is still considered by many to be the greatest jazz singer of all time. She died in 1959, aged 44.
Its value is in its witness to the grinding humiliation of the
racism that tainted every moment of her louche life
*London Review of Books*
A wrenchingly authentic account of Holiday's turbulent trajectory
from abused child to jazz genius
*Daily Mail*
Her troubles are long behind her now. Her genius however, shows no
sign of dimming any time soon.
*Sunday Times*
A searing account of her life as a brilliant artist, a heroin
addict, simultaneously worshipped as a siren of sorrow and
persecuted by a legal system structured by systemic racism. Booze
runs like a glimmering ribbon through these pages - she even makes
moonshine from potato peelings while incarcerated - but Holiday
emerges as a figure far more nuanced and human than her mythic
image.
*Leslie Jamison*
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