Review of Peter Ames Carlin’s new bio from Dwight Garner of The New York Times.
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Another review, this one by Mark Krotov for The New Yorker.
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the New Yorker one is a pretty good review, other than that it calls Nightswimming “irredeemable”. 
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On the occasion of Peter Ames Carlin being a guest on this week’s episode of Sound Opinions, co-host Greg Kot lists his 9 favorite R.E.M. albums.
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An excerpt from the book here, taking in the Monster tour and Bill’s aneurysm. A lot more detail than I’ve read before. Scary stuff.
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Wow, no kidding. And he was 38 at the time? Man.
I just finished the book and came here looking to chat about it. I thought it was like a very high level look at the group’s history that didn’t really feel like it uncovered new ground. And it was a little weird the way it gets into the heads of the band members… kind of assuming what they were thinking at the time. And the textual analysis of some of the lyrics was interesting the way it was inserted into the narrative of the book and tied to it, but it felt like such a personal thing to do… it almost didn’t fit for me. All in all though it reignited some dormant REM feelings for me and I ended up listening to their full discography in reverse chronological order when I wasn’t reading the book the past two weeks. So fun.
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I agree. It definitely left me wanting. So much so, I read David Buckley’s excellent “R.E.M. — Fiction” immediately afterwards!
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I’m only up to about 1981, so this assessment might be a little premature. But I’m enjoying the book more than I expected.
I would agree with comments about “getting in the band’s heads” - a lot of the narrative feels somewhat based on conjecture and filling in gaps with assumed perspectives. The downside of this is that you sometimes question the validity of the text. But the unexpected upside, for me, is that it succeeds in really putting the reader right there with them in the moment. It’s a very transportative narrative if you’re willing to go with it. For that reason it’s got some value as a different approach on their story, and it does seem pretty exhaustive in corroborating details from people who were there, but I don’t know how much of it the band would agree with.
For example there’s a level of detail and intimacy to Michael’s childhood/ back story which really paints the picture of his adolescence in a way I haven’t seen before, wrestling with identity, exploring style and his growing relationship with art and performance, almost like a Michael Stipe The Celebrity origin story; but who knows how accurate it really is in terms of getting inside his teenage psyche. It’s a good chapter either way.
Having previously read Remarks, Fiction and It Crawled From the South, I’m not sure this would ever replace any of those as being more definitive, but it is an unexpectedly fresh approach to their story (at least so far anyway)