First what this book is not. It may be, as its publisher claims, ‘an extraordinary and haunting new life’ of the great jazz singer Billie Holiday, but it is not a conventional, chronologically arranged biography. JuliaBlackburn has taken a series of tape-recorded interviews conducted over thirty years ago by Linda Kuehl , added research of her own, and presented a kaleidoscopic and disjointed portrait of her subject, and the first clear evocation that I have read of the world from which Billie emerged and in which she lived. It is a series of views, often extraordinarily contradictory, seen through the eyes of childhood friends, lovers, drunks, pimps, narcotics agents, and musicians. 

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