Scars of Sweet Paradise : The Life and Times of Janis Joplin

Janis Joplin was the skyrocket chick of the sixties, the woman who broke into the boys' club of rock and out of the stifling good-girl femininity of postwar America. With her incredible wall-of-sound vocals, Joplin was the voice of a generation, and when she OD'd on heroin in October 1970, a generation's dreams crashed and burned with her. Alice Echols pushes past the legary Joplin-the red-hot mama of her own invention-as well as the familiar portrait of the screwed-up star victimized by the era she symbolized, to examine the roots of Joplin's muscianship and explore a generation's experiment with high-risk living and the terrible price it exacted.

A deeply affecting biography of one of America's most brilliant and tormented stars, Scars of Sweet Paradise is also a vivid and incisive cultural history of an era that changed the world for us all.

“A richly detailed portrait. Echols stares unflinchingly at the fault lines of the '60s counter-culture.” —Susie Linfield, Los Angeles Times

“This Life's a real Pearl.” —Bob Gulla, People

“A serious biography-it does the important stuff well.” —Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post

“In Echol's creation Joplin emerges as a true original, compelling, confounding, and rife with contradictions.” —Lisa Shea, Elle