Somebody to Love
The Life, Death and Legacy of Freddie Mercury
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4.4 • 8 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A biography examining the final days of Freddie Mercury in the dawn of AIDS and the legacy he left behind.
For the first time, the final years of one of the world’s most captivating rock showman are laid bare. Including interviews from Freddie Mercury’s closest friends in the last years of his life, along with personal photographs, Somebody to Love is an authoritative biography of the great man.
Here are previously unknown and startling facts about the singer and his life, moving detail on his lifelong search for love and personal fulfilment, and of course his tragic contraction of a then killer disease in the mid-1980s.
Woven throughout Freddie’s life is the shocking story of how the HIV virus came to hold the world in its grip, was cruelly labelled “The Gay Plague” and the unwitting few who indirectly infected thousands of men, women and children—Freddie Mercury himself being one of the most famous.
The death of this vibrant and spectacularly talented rock star, shook the world of medicine as well as the world of music. Somebody to Love finally puts the record straight and pays detailed tribute to the man himself.
“Touts rare—and in some cases, never before seen—images of Mercury and new insight into his life.”—People
“The book could be a standalone epidemiological study about the history of HIV/AIDS even without Mercury. But eventually, it weaves him into the timeline, giving a detailed account of his personal life, and his battle with the disease that tragically took him at age 45 in 1991. The result is a powerfully emotional read.”—Rolling Stone
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The team behind the ill-conceived Michael Jackson biography 83 Minutes returns to weave together the histories of Freddie Mercury and HIV/AIDS, the disease that took his life, in this clunky and poorly constructed work. Richards and Langthorne use a handful of broad historical coincidences to tie man and illness together in the name of heightening the melodrama that so intensely suffuses their narrative from its beginning. Clarity-fogging run-on sentences do the heavy lifting of actually delivering information about the spread of HIV so that more energy can be spent on speculating on Mercury's sexuality. The authors' consistent insistence that Mercury was gay rather than bisexual is faintly stunning, given Mercury's passionate relationships with women such as Mary Austin and his own statements confirming his love for both men and women many of which are not included in this book, apparently because they violate the authors' thesis. It's a shame that Richards and Langthorne's ostensible purpose to pay tribute to the needless victims of AIDS and homophobia is overshadowed by their desire to sensationalize the life and death of an international music icon.
