Heroes: David Bowie and Berlin (Reverb)

Very interesting reading of Bowie's so called creative period. As a fan, I was able to see how he works to create his music and what his strength and weakness as human are. It was a bit hard to get used to the author's style of writing but I got into it once I started reading. Good book, if you are a fan of David Bowie.

Strange book. It's as much about Berlin as it is Bowie. The writing style is artistic and somewhat schizophrenic. A lot of it is written in the present tense, which is weird. For the first part of the book, it seems like the author dislikes Bowie (which is actually kind of refreshing), but then it has its moments of Bowie-worship as well. Some of the information and scenes from the first half of the book are then repeated later in the book for no good reason, just total redundancy. Amazon won't let me do half stars, but I really wanted to give it 2.5 stars, no more.

A piece of art about Bowie's prequel life at Berlin. A great resource for fans, music lovers and everyone who desires to read a great book about a unique phase on music history.

What a great book on Bowie's Berlin period: what was going on in his head and what he made of it.Tobias Ruther not only knows how to go the extra mile in research, he knows how to weave a narrative out of the facts. And he knows how to speculate and tell the difference.More than that, this author, unknown to me until now, has his own style and it's fluent and ironic and incisive and succinct, with enough iconoclastic stand-off to see beyond Hero-worship.I love his rhetoric."Who would want to listen to such a thing?"He has a way of producing the rhetorical equivalent of the double-take - - "No one. No, everyone would!" - - with some nice variations, and what more appropriate topic for the double-take than Bowie's shape-shifting tenure in Berlin?Timing. Tobias Ruther has the innate confidence of an innately good writer to plant a notion in passing with a nicely timed delayed echo: it's part of his style.He notices actor David Niven as one of the few audience-members who *doesn't* walk out of a concert by German band Can, but what's Niven doing there in the first place? - - returning to the name-drop a few sentences later in case you thought you hallucinated his presence - - "Among them was David Niven. And David Bowie."Another one: he cites BLADE RUNNER as an appropriate evocation for HEROES...let's the anachronism stand for a paragraph and then returns for the double-take:"But BLADE RUNNER still hasn't been filmed yet, has it?"Bowie fantasised about crossing timelines, and this book manages to lay echoes of time past and future over the linear timeline of Bowie and Berlin and it works, beautifully. It's rich, and easy to read.Bowie should read this, and recommend it to all his friends.

A good read inside Bowies life during the legendary Berlin phase and how he got there .I was expecting a bit more about his life with Iggy Pop its got to be the most hilarious flat share in history . Dave and Iggy !!!!Who's turn is it to clean the toilet ?

as far as i know there are only two books about the berlin years of david bowie. this is in my opinion the best written by a german who dabbles in the museums visited by the singer and the altbau wehre he lived

Bowie is surviving on cigarettes, cocaine and milk and looks like a corpse. Moving to LA has made him an international superstar but he is broke (having paid off his managers) and his latest persona 'The Thin White Duke' is harming not only his health but his sanity. So he decides on a complete change, he moves to Berlin partly to save money and partly because of his childhood interest in German expressionist art. He comes off drugs and enters one of the most creative sections of his career - the albums Low and Heroes (and to a lesser extent Lodger) - where he makes music so different from mainstream seventies rock that he could be channeling the future. Berlin has an equally fascinating history: the Bohemian experiments in art and lifestyle in the twenties and thirties, the rise of the Nazis, flattened by allied bombers in the second world war and divided by a wall in the sixties and economically and culturally isolated from the rest of Germany. How much has Berlin shaped Bowie? And how much has the cultural history of Berlin been shaped by Bowie (where even today there are numerous tours allowing visitors to follow in his footsteps or bicycle where he bicycled). Tobias Ruther should be the man to answer these questions. He is a Bowie fan (without being an obsessive) and, as a journalist on the Frankfutter Allgemeine Sonntageszeitung, he's steeped in German history and culture.The central problem of the book is that Ruther does not have an overarching theory, so I was never quite certain if he thought Bowie came to Berlin to be himself, to escape himself or to try on some new character (for example serious artist or become a character from a German Expressionist film or even if wearing shirts bought at a petrol station he was playing at being a 'regular' guy). The second problem is that Ruther has no new material. Everybody connected with Bowie's time in Berlin has been interviewed so many times that they are either fed up (and have shut up) or they have polished their stories into a legend. So he has to rely on the main protagonists memoirs - eg: Viscounti and Angie Bowie - or quoting interviews from the time with other journalists. There is nothing about how Bowie came off the drugs or his relationship with Iggy Pop (who lived with him in Berlin and continued to use heroine).Fortunately, Ruther is stronger on Berlin and German Culture and I was able to use this book as a spring board for further reading - rather in the way Bowie has opened the eyes of my generation to so many artists and movements through his passing magpie interest in them. However, even here, there is a problem. Ruther assumes knowledge many of his readers won't have. I do know the Brucke Museuem - where Bowie used to regularly cycle to ingest the Expressionist Art- but I don't have a proper understanding of the artists who made up the movement. I know nothing about the pre-war Expressionist German films and had to flip over to wikipedia to fill in my gaps.There is one final problem, which can't be blamed on Ruther, but the book was written before Bowie's death so it finishes with Bowie's return to Berlin - via the 'David Bowie Is' exhibition - which features a postcard from Christopher Isherwood (whose Berlin novels fed the young Bowie's fascination with the thirties) and Bowie's keys to his apartment in Berlin - almost as if by holding onto them he would always remain a citizen of Berlin.And perhaps in our collective imaginations, he will always live in Berlin...