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| Room Full of Mirrors: A Biography of Jimi Hendrix | 
 enlarge | Author: Charles R. Cross
Publisher: Hyperion
Category: Book
List Price: $15.95
Buy New: $5.00
You Save: $10.95 (69%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  54 reviews
Sales Rank: 44151
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 400
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 7.8 x 5.2 x 1.2
ISBN: 0786888415
Dewey Decimal Number: 787.87166092
EAN: 9780786888412
ASIN: 0786888415
Publication Date: August 8, 2006
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: New - Fast shipping from trusted wholesaler with many exclusive publisher contracts.
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| Customer Reviews:
 Groovy October 20, 2007
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
I love the music of Jimi Hendrix. This biography is very interesting. It was a real page turner. I picked it up and read through it in one weekend.
 Great on life. Music not so much. August 16, 2007
I think for what this book set about to be it's easily "4" or "5." The author wanted to write about Hendrix's life -- almost half the book is before he becomes a rock star. I really enjoyed the scenes set in his early days -- stuff we don't know so much about, like touring the South with Little Richard. However, it seems to me if you write a biography about someone as God-like as Hendrix there should be moments of higher level of stylistic interpretation regarding what exactly his music is.
What Hendrix did was profound. He turned thew combination of Blues and psychedellic rock into something that simply did not exist until then. (Ok, there was Clapton, but. . . no time for qualifiers.) His sound was not just something people listened to. The Hendrix sound is the soul of a world in transformation.
If you read, for instance, "LAST TRAIN TO MEMPHIS" about Elivs's early years, a lot of what the book is about is how this magical swirl of cultural forces in Memphis in the early 50s transformed America. ROOM FULL OF MIRRORS is basically just about the very interesting life of one man who was a big rock star and a great guitarist.
The Premier Jimi Bio August 11, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
If you take the time to read through all of the reader reviews on this book, you'll see a broad diversity of opinion. Charles Cross managed to ruffle more than a few feathers it seems. Without a doubt, Cross dug deeper into Jimi's early years and got closer to the people that were a part of Jimi's formative years than any other journalist.
The criticism that Cross failed to expose anything new about the fame years is valid but ultimately unimportant. The fame years were witnessed, glorified and documented by many and they are somewhat mythical in their presentation of the grandeur that collapsed into demise. But if one tries to understand what drove Jimi to be what he became, all other bios fall short. I remember wondering how this gifted kid could possibly know and breathe the blues as he did. The easy answer was that the lack of a stable childhood and his mother's early death were the source of Jimi's blues and no doubt they were part of the picture. But Cross spells it all out much more clearly and gives the story coherence and resonance. By elucidating the genesis of the genius, Cross manages to do what no other Jimi biographer has accomplished - and that is he brings the roots of Jimi's pain to life and in doing so shows the source of energy that provided his incredible drive. I thank Charles Cross for bringing closure to so many questions that had been swirling in my mind for well over thirty years.
Worthy effort, but misses a lot July 14, 2007
Cross makes two important contributions: 1) As others have noted, there's a lot of new information about Jimi's early life and the first 100 pages or so give a a very moving picture of his childhood. 2) The book makes clear how important Jimi's Seattle background was to his multicultural outlook, which is what made him willing and able to cross established boundaries more easily than if he had been born in raised in say the South or Northeast.
The rest of the book is fairly perfunctory stuff and Jimi's music is pretty much absent. Cross presents music as something Hendrix only thought about when he tired of cavorting with groupies and assorted low-lifes.
I'm also docking the book a star for not having an adequate bibliograpy.
Amazing May 25, 2007
This book gives you such a close glimpse at Jimi's upbringing and inner visions and stuggles that you feel one with him. I couldn't put this book down and hope to come across more like this. Mr. Cross does a fantastic job uncovering the life of the greatest guitarist in history.
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