Carole King: She Made the Earth Move
Jane Eisner. Yale Univ, $28 (272p) ISBN 978-0-30025-946-9
In this comprehensive account, journalist Eisner (Taking Back the Vote) contextualizes Carole King’s career and contributions to American music. Drawing on previously published interviews and King’s own memoir—the notoriously private singer, Eisner notes, declined to be interviewed for the book—she begins with King’s childhood in a heavily Jewish part of Brooklyn, where she discovered a facility for language and was influenced by show tunes and early rock ’n’ roll. After getting pregnant at age 17, she married and dropped out of college to raise her child and write songs with her first husband, lyricist Gerry Goffin. Along the way, she churned out such hits as the Shirelles’ “Will You Love Me Tomorrow” and developed an innovative piano style that involved a “complicated interplay between melody and chords, as if they are in conversation.” Later, her career as a singer-songwriter took off with such solo albums as 1971’s Tapestry. Despite following some historical tangents a bit too far, the author mostly succeeds in her efforts to situate her subject within a dynamic cultural moment where “popular musical youth culture” was flourishing and American antisemitism was fading, making space for King’s rise at “just the moment that the culture was waiting to embrace someone like her.” The result is a robust celebration of a legendary musician. (Sept.)
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Reviewed on: 06/13/2025
Genre: Nonfiction