Description: "The long-awaited memoir by Cameron Crowe--one of America's most iconic journalists and filmmakers--revealing his formative years in rock and roll and bringing to life stories that shaped a generation, in the bestselling tradition of Patti Smith's Just Kids with a dash of Moss Hart's Act One. The Uncool is a ... dispatch from a lost world, the real-life events that became Almost Famous, and a coming-of-age journey filled with characters you won't soon forget"--
Brief description: Cameron Crowe became Rolling Stone's youngest-ever contributor as a fifteen-year-old high school graduate, going on to conduct all-time best interviews with the likes of Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Elton John, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Led Zeppelin, the Eagles, Fleetwood Mac, and the Who. Crowe is also an acclaimed filmmaker who has written and directed films including Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Say Anything..., Singles, Jerry Maguire, Vanilla Sky, and Almost Famous (for which he won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay). He wrote the definitive book on the work of writer-director Billy Wilder, Conversations with Wilder. Crowe is currently at work on a film based on the life and music of Joni Mitchell. He has three children and lives in Southern California.
Review Quotes: "Remarkable . . . Such a joy and so well written . . . My favorite book in a long, long time."
--Anderson Cooper
--New York magazine "Splendid . . . Crowe arrived already so fully developed as the world's most precocious teen scribe in the '70s that it was hard to imagine he would ever get much better as a prose stylist. . . . But The Uncool proves that he has. . . . It's the kind of a book where you want to blow a chef's kiss to sentence after well-honed sentence, written in a richly detailed, at times almost passionately epigrammatic fashion. . . . If it's stories about the greatest musicians of all time you want, come for the Allman Brothers and Fleetwood Mac, or a description of Gram Parsons' and Emmylou Harris' first musical encounter, then stay for the just-as-compelling stories of his family life growing up in Indio and San Diego. Both these sides were well-explored in Almost Famous, but The Uncool brings them to a light and life that dramatic rendering could only begin to get at."
--Chris Willman, Variety "Crowe's charming new memoir is an elegy for a lost time and place, when rock 'n' roll culture was still a secret handshake. . . . As he does so often in this book, Crowe pulls the reader in with his keenly observant eye. . . . Reminds us of what has been lost, the myths and mystique that fueled our rock star fantasies and gave the music an aura of magic."
--Marc Weingarten, Los Angeles Times "A candid memoir packed with untold revelations about his unconventional career--from riding shotgun with David Bowie to studio battles over Spicoli."
--Mia Galuppo, The Hollywood Reporter "Lyrical and compulsively readable . . . The Uncool captures an extraordinarily inventive period in which rock music was stretching out in all directions."
--Alex Needham, The Guardian