Reviews - Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography Of Kurt Cobain

230 reviews for:

Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography Of Kurt Cobain

Really good read....you know, the older I get, the less and less impressed I am with Kurt Donald Cobain. Obviously 13 year old me would be apoplectic at that idea, but ultimately he was a junkie for whom his band, his wife and his child were not reasons to get sober. His parents divorce was such a traumatic event on his life that he couldn't take the one step to save his own marriage - get clean - and allowed his daughter to not only grow up without a father, but deal with the trauma of his suicide on top of it. Because he loved getting high more than he loved his daughter.

Axl Rose was right on everything he ever said about Kurt.

maude_mooney's review against another edition

3.0

This might have put an end to my nirvana deep dive. I know the biographies I’ve read that are written by friends of Kurt’s will be very biased, but this author felt like way too much of a swing the other way. It felt like he was trying so hard to get the reader to dislike Kurt and focused so heavily on sexuality and made him seem like a malicious liar. And although he definitely did some very horrible things in his life, I would have appreciated more focus on his mental health and addiction issues rather than it feeling like the author just thought he was too lazy to give up drugs. Anyways, not a necessarily bad read, just seemed like a very negative lens.

madisontoth's review against another edition

4.25

emotional informative slow-paced

zamyatins_fears's review against another edition

1.5

This is a tough one to rate. On one hand, it felt very detailed and it's clear a lot of work went into it. I can respect it as a heavily-researched work. On the other hand, the author took some creative liberties with Kurt Cobain's suicide that were in bad taste and there were definitely some other parts of the book where his editorializing seemed unnecessary and more in the realm of creative fiction.

I have no real opinion on Courtney Love, but there were many incidents where the author seemed to be presenting her as an example of a witty trash talker when the reported conversation seemed to be little more than angry nonsense. Which I suppose, is an example of one of the issues I had when reading this. Too often the author's editorializing doesn't seem to be supported by the surrounding information presented. Instead, it leaves you feeling as if the most important context was cut out.

Perhaps my biggest issue though may have more to do with the ebook copy I had. It was badly edited. There were multiple incidents of the same sentence being reworked in a slightly different way, often in incomplete fragments. Frequently enough to be unforgivable, in my mind.

nipipis's review against another edition

4.0

Otrā grāmata, ko lasu no Mansarda biogrāfiju sērijas, abām ļoti bēdīgs tulkojums latviski. Teikumiem mēdz nebūt jēgas, laiki un locījumi teikuma ietvaros mēdz nesakrist utml.