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The 15 Best David Bowie Books

By Corey Seymour

Today marks four years since David Bowie died—two days after his 69th birthday, when he also released his final, monumental album, Blackstar . And while there was no shortage of books about him during his lifetime, the market has virtually exploded since his passing. It’s no big secret why: The nature of Bowie’s fame, genius, influences, and influence is an all-encompassing thing that’s relevant to art and photography, fashion, theater and performance, and every shade and school of critical analysis. (There’s also no dearth of scandalous tell-alls and tabloid-y, fly-by-night biographies, which we’re ignoring here out of respect—a man who orchestrated his passing with the level of discretion and artistic triumph that Bowie did doesn’t deserve to be feasted on by scavengers.)

Here’s our pick of the best Bowie books for every person, occasion, and special interest—whether you’re merely interested in looking at some pictures or have committed yourself to a self-taught course in Advanced Bowie Studies.

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The Rise of David Bowie, 1972–1973 by Mick Rock

For pure visual splendor focusing on Bowie’s most well-known persona, Ziggy Stardust, nothing beats this volume of Bowie-blessed photographs from the artist’s official photographer and creative partner—with half of the photos in it published for the first time. For mesmerizing, fly-on-the-wall documentation of Bowie’s glitter-clad, glam-rock, his/her Ziggy, nothing beats this.

On Bowie by Rob Sheffield

Still personal—but less weird than Brooker’s search for meaning—is Rolling Stone contributing editor Rob Sheffield’s tribute, written at lightning speed in the immediate aftermath of Bowie’s passing. Like The Last Interview , it’s a slim volume that packs a punch: While Sheffield’s knowledge of Bowie runs deep, this is neither a showy book nor an academic one, and while his sense of loss is palpable, On Bowie isn’t maudlin or morose—it’s deeply informed, often hilarious, and properly celebratory.

The Age of Bowie: How David Bowie Made a World of Difference by Paul Morley

Morley, a veteran British rock critic, pours blood, sweat, and tears on the pages in this freewheeling, deeply informed, and, yes, ragingly personal admixture of biography, memoir, loving tribute, cultural theory, and enlightened self-help book. Pretentious? At times, wildly—but that’s part of its immense charm. Morley—who conjured the theoretical framework and title of the David Bowie Is exhibitions—states early on that “everybody has their own Bowie,” and it’s his refusal to put constraints on either Bowie or his own rococo rendering of him that that makes these 496 pages so indispensable.

Strange Fascination: Bowie: The Definitive Story by David Buckley

While this biography was published a decade before Bowie died—look elsewhere for coverage of his death, his legacy, and his last two albums—this is likely the most insightful critical biography we have, deeply learned about not just the songs, but the albums, the tours, the personas, and the artistic vision. You’ll have to put a bit more into it than most of the rest of these books, but you’ll reap more from it as well.

• International edition
• Australia edition
• Europe edition

Strange fascination: The best David Bowie books

A longside the supremely well-read Bob Dylan, David Bowie was probably popular music’s most bookish star. Christopher Isherwood was an obvious influence on his so-called Berlin period; George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four inspired much of his classic album Diamond Dogs . Judging by a much-circulated list of his favourite 100 books released in 2013, he was also a fan of such literary touchstones as William Faulkner , Albert Camus and F Scott Fitzgerald , as well as a range of modern works, from Martin Amis’s Money to the ribald British comic-cum-institution Viz.

It’s a little strange, then, that whereas good books about Dylan and the Beatles extend into the distance, the range of decent texts about Bowie remains relatively small. Such coffee table works as Mick Rock’s The Rise of David Bowie, 1972-1973 (Taschen, 2016) handsomely showcase the visual aspects of his legend; if you want a forensic guide to his songs, dramatic roles, videos and more, you should start with the pretty authoritative A-Z dossier, The Complete David Bowie by Nicholas Pegg (Titan), first published in 2000 and most recently updated after its subject’s death. But when it comes to in-depth career histories, there are not many to choose from.

Thankfully, one of the most high-profile biographies that appeared before Bowie’s death is very good indeed. If you’re after the definitive tale told with both a novelist’s sense of drama and a deep appreciation of the music, try Paul Trynka’s Starman (Sphere, 2010), written with the help of a huge array of interviewees. Among its many charms are its whip-smart use of endless anecdotes: witness everything from Trynka’s evocation of Bowie’s upbringing on the London/Kent borders (one friend remembers him being “always well-scrubbed, with clean fingernails”) to the recollections of the one-time Deep Purple bassist and singer Glenn Hughes, with whom Bowie shared some of an infamously coke-crazed period in Los Angeles, circa mid-1975.

“The enduring image of their time together is the two of them, sitting alongside each other, isolated,” writes Trynka. “Glenn obsessively working out riffs on the guitar, and David watching the same dark, disquieting movies, over and over, both lost in their own world.” Clearly, there is a certain sickened romance to such scenes, but Hughes is having none of it: “It was miserable,” he says. “It always is miserable.”

David Buckley’s Strange Fascination (Virgin, 1999, last updated in 2012) isn’t as exhaustively researched or as well written, and it tends to restrict its focus to the music – but in that sense, it capably shines light on Bowie’s ceaseless creativity. By way of showcasing the critical faculties at work, 1980’s “Ashes to Ashes” is nicely summed up as a work of “Edwardian queasiness, portraying a world of nostalgia, childhood reminscence and distant memories”, while the accompanying video is portrayed as the spectacle of Bowie summoning “archetypes that had pervaded his writing in the past decade, in order to kill them off and lay to rest the ghost of impersonation”. From the book’s title onwards, most of what Buckley writes is based on what evidently first drew him to his subject: the idea that “rock stars are meant to be weird, disquieting and discomfiting”.

Bowie’s Berlin period, which stretched between 1976 and 1978, was about a partial retreat from those demands, into what then passed for (relative) sobriety and calm. As against his time in LA, he claimed to have suddenly become “incredibly straight, level, assertive, moderate” – although his new companion Iggy Pop later claimed that their average seven days broke down into “two for bingeing, two for recovery and three more for any other activity”.

Whatever, his time in Germany and the music it sparked is explored in Thomas Jerome Seabrook’s Bowie in Berlin (Jawbone, 2008), a mixture of biography and song-by-song analysis that authoritatively nails its subject matter: a time, as the author puts it, of “bingeing and purging, relapse and recovery” – and some of the most visionary work of Bowie’s career.

As a portrait of what Bowie was in Germany to escape from, his first wife Angie ’s memoir, the infamous Backstage Passes: Life on the Wild Side with David Bowie (Cooper Square, 1993), takes some beating. The kind of read that mixes tabloid-esque confessions with psychobabble, its tone is established from the off: “We went back to Paddington together,” she writes of one of the couple’s first encounters, “and what was going to happen started happening. I got fucked.” That said, she also makes this claim: “Sex wasn’t the mainspring between David and me. In our partnership the primary imperatives were creative expression, philosophical growth, and the achievement of our separate, mutual, and equally bright-burning ambitions.” He went on to shape pop culture in his image; she ended up in the Celebrity Big Brother house – where, in a grim twist of fate, she learned of her former husband’s death.

Less sleazy and often more enlightening accounts of Bowie by some of his closest collaborators are contained in David Bowie: The Pitt Report (Omnibus, 1983), a retelling of his pre-fame years by his first manager Kenneth Pitt, which is out of print but easily bought second-hand; and the autobiography of his producer and foil Tony Visconti, titled Bowie, Bolan and the Brooklyn Boy (Harper Collins, 2007). Both are full of great material – Visconti’s account of Bowie’s first meeting with John Lennon, for example, is a treat – but are inevitably lacking one aspect of Bowie’s life that is central to his whole story: the bond he formed with millions of his fans, and the way he catalysed their fantasies and ambitions in a way that no musician has since.

This is the basis of Paul Morley’s The Age of Bowie (Simon & Schuster, 2016), the 450-page book its author claims to have written in 10 weeks flat after its subject’s death. It is as idiosyncratic and knowingly pretentious as most of Morley’s writing, but also full of tributes that might be overblown, but speak powerful truths. One of the best captures the magic Bowie spread with his first bona fide classic album, 1971’s Hunky Dory , and might just as well apply to any of the most brilliant phases of his artistic progress. “He flooded everyday reality with exotic information, and made intellectual discovery seem incredibly glamorous and accessible,” writes Morley. “Those indifferent to his ways would probably have just seen grotesque sexualised pantomime, heard noisy, repetitive nursery rhymes, and a narcissistic, half-naked, fidgety, goofy, effeminate singer wearing hobgoblin hair [and] trying far too hard to impress. To those who got it, he was at ease exhibiting his mind and body in the public glare so fantastically, and if you had cracked the code, he was dramatically splitting reality wide open and penetrating time itself. The perfect role model for a teenager.”

• David Bowie

On the Books That Most Influenced the Great David Bowie

Genius recognizes genius.

Widely acknowledged as one of the most influential artists and pop-cultural icons of the 20th century, David Bowie created music that was laced with symbolism and references. This not only showcased Bowie’s talent as an artist but proved Bowie was an avid consumer of art himself. Below are some of the books that influenced and helped shape the artist and personality of David Bowie.

Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange (1962)

The debt owed by David Bowie’s first hit song, “Space Oddity,” to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey couldn’t be more obvious. But Kubrick’s next film, a chilly adaptation of Anthony Burgess’s novel A Clockwork Orange , is where the story really gets interesting.

Set in a totalitarian, future-present Britain, A Clockwork Orange is the story of delinquent, Beethoven-loving schoolboy Alex, the leader of a gang that spends its nights raping and pillaging while wired on amphetamine-laced “milk-plus.” Kubrick had set aside his planned biopic of Napoléon Bonaparte to make a movie version after being given a copy of the book by screenwriter Terry Southern, with whom he’d worked on Dr. Strangelove , and falling in love with it. In 1972 Bowie repurposed its swagger and shock value for his career-making turn as “leper messiah” Ziggy Stardust, a bisexual alien rock star with fluffy red hair and a weakness for asymmetric knitted bodysuits who ends up being killed by his fans.

Ziggy was a collision of unstable elements—some obscure (drugaddled rocker Vince Taylor; American psychobilly pioneer the Legendary Stardust Cowboy), others less so. It’s easy to see what Bowie took from Kubrick’s movie because, like his hijacking of the melody from “Over the Rainbow” for the chorus of “Starman,” the borrowing is so blatant. Bowie-as-Ziggy walked onstage to Beethoven’s Symphony no. 9, as played by Moog synthesizer maestro Wendy Carlos, while his band the Spiders’ costumes were modeled on those of Alex and his droogs—“friends” in Burgess’s invented language Nadsat.

The early 70s was a grim, embattled era in England. John Lennon sang in 1970 that the (hippie) dream was over. But 1971 was the year things turned brutish as the alternative society splintered into a mass of competing factions such as the radical-left urban terrorists the Angry Brigade—Britain’s answer to Germany’s Baader-Meinhof gang—who launched a string of bomb attacks against Establishment targets. Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange came out in the UK in January 1972, five months before The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars . The following year the director withdrew it from cinemas after receiving death threats; the gesture amplified the film’s air of leering menace while saying a good deal about the febrile social climate.

Both the movie and its source novel celebrate the exquisite sense of belonging that being in a gang affords. But they’re also interested in the aftermath: what happens when the gang dissolves and the power that held it together leaks away. You can, if you want, see Alex as Ziggy and his droogs as the Spiders—the fictional band, not Bowie’s actual musicians Mick Ronson, Woody Woodmansey, and Trevor Bolder. In Bowie’s opaque Ziggy narrative they’re cast as bitter sidemen who bitch about their leader’s fans and wonder if they should give him a taste of the old ultraviolence by crushing his sweet hands. . . .

The novel itself had a tragic genesis. The story goes that in 1959 Burgess was diagnosed incorrectly with terminal brain cancer. Spurred into action, he wrote five novels very quickly to support his soon-to-be widow. A Clockwork Orange took him three weeks and was inspired by a horrific incident in April 1944 where his first wife, Lynne, pregnant at the time—she subsequently miscarried—was assaulted in a blackout by a group of American soldiers. She’d been on her way home from the London offices of the Ministry of War Transport where she was involved in planning the D-Day landings. A Clockwork Orange is interested not just in what might drive someone to carry out this kind of attack, but also in the ethics of rehabilitation. Can you force someone to be good by torturing them, as per the Ludovico Technique aversion therapy Alex undergoes?

If Burgess and Kubrick were equally important to Bowie, it’s worth noting the differences in their visions, differences Burgess considered so stark he ended up renouncing the novel because he felt the film made it easy for readers to misunderstand the book. He meant that his handling of sex and violence was more nuanced than Kubrick’s, which might be true, though in some ways the novel is nastier—for example, the scene where Alex rapes two underage girls after getting them drunk. In the movie they are clearly adult women, the sex is clearly consensual, and Kubrick uses a fast-motion technique to blur the action and create a slapstick tone.

The biggest difference, though, has to do with the ending. The British edition of the novel ends on an optimistic note, with Alex turning his back on violence and contemplating fatherhood. But the original US edition on which Kubrick based his screenplay omits this epilogue. It ends with Alex saying sarcastically, “I was cured all right,” having just shared with us his dream of “carving the whole litso [face] of the creeching [screaming] world with my cut-throat britva [razor].”

Burgess had been intrigued by the razor-packing teddy boys of the late 1950s. Kubrick picked up on the androgyny of the mod culture Bowie flirted with in the mid-1960s. For example, Kubrick turned Alex’s false eyelashes—bought in bulk from hip London boutique Biba, bombed by the Angry Brigade shortly after the shoot concluded—into a key visual motif. Nadsat, the Anglo-Russian slang spoken by Alex, crops up in “Suffragette City.” But the way Bowie used it decades later in one of his final songs, “Girl Loves Me,” suggests a deeper appreciation that leads back to the rich linguistic textures of the novel. For in “Girl Loves Me,” Bowie mixes it knowingly with the secret gay language Polari, reinforcing the cultural historian Michael Bracewell’s point that A Clockwork Orange was an audit on modern masculinity. Finding men to be in crisis, the movie hastened the birth of a new kind of loner—the young soul rebel, who offset corruption with an intense emotional idealism. That sounds like Bowie to me.

Read it while listening to: “Girl Loves Me,” “Suffragette City”

If you like this, try: Graham Greene, Brighton Rock

Yukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea (1963)

In the Berlin flat where he lived while he was recording “Heroes” , Bowie slept beneath his own painting of Yukio Mishima, the handsome Japanese multihyphenate (author, actor, playwright, singer, terrorist) who committed suicide by hara-kiri in November 1970 after he and four members of his Tatenokai private militia failed in their attempt to incite a coup intended to restore the power of Japan’s emperor.

What did Bowie find so admirable in Mishima’s warrior machismo? Perhaps the fact that it was so obviously a performance. Film historian Donald Richie, who knew Mishima, thought him a dandy whose talent was bound up with his understanding that if you behave the way you want to be, you will become it: you become who you are by practicing.

As a child, Kimitake Hiraoka—Yukio Mishima was a pseudonym—was raised in isolation by his deranged, bullying grandmother Natsu, who refused to let him play with other boys or be exposed to sunlight. Encouraged by her, he read everything he could lay his hands on and emerged a model of poised, precocious elegance. To exorcise his shame at having been rejected by the army on health grounds, an event recounted in his semiautobiographical first novel Confessions of a Mask , he transformed his weedy body into a solid knot of muscle. He learned the ways of the samurai, becoming skilled at kendo (swordsmanship).

Despite having a wife and two children, Mishima was openly gay rather than bisexual; he rationalized this paradox in a later autobiographical work, Sun and Steel , as a means of embracing contradiction and collision. (Another key scene in Confessions of a Mask is his first, explosively successful attempt at masturbation, electrifyed by a painting of St. Sebastian pierced all over by arrows.) To please his ailing mother, his marriage was an arranged one, in traditional Japanese fashion. Among Mishima’s requirements were that his bride should be no taller than he; pretty, with a round face; and careful not to disturb him while he worked. Eventually he settled on Yoko Sugiyama, the 21-year-old daughter of a popular Japanese painter.

Having himself come out as bisexual in 1972, albeit in what was felt to be a publicity stunt, Bowie was still talking up his fluidity four years later. His gay side was mostly dormant, Bowie explained to 19-year-old Cameron Crowe in a deliberately outrageous interview in the September 1976 issue of Playboy , but visiting Japan always roused it reliably: “There are such beautiful-looking boys over there. Little boys? Not that little. About 18 or 19. They have a wonderful sort of mentality. They’re all queens until they reach 25, then suddenly they become samurai, get married and have thousands of children. I love it.”

An allegory of Japan’s postwar humiliation not usually ranked among Mishima’s best works, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea has the brutal symmetry of one of the Grimms’ fairy tales Mishima devoured as a child. It unfolds in a suburb of Yokohama in the aftermath of the war. Fusako, a widow who runs a store selling European luxury goods, takes a sailor, Ryuji, as a lover. Her son Noboru watches them have sex through a peephole in his room. At first Noboru idolizes Ryuji as a hero who has traveled the world, but the next day, on the way back from killing and vivisecting a stray kitten with his sociopathic school friends, he meets Ryuji again and decides he is weak and ineffectual because he has sprayed water on himself to keep cool.

Ryuji swaps his seafaring life for domestic security with Noboru’s mother. But Noboru is unimpressed, even more so when Fusako catches him looking through the peephole a second time, and Ryuji refuses to punish Noboru despite Fusako’s urging. Noboru and his gang decide to restore Ryuji’s lost honor by giving him the full kitten treatment.

Anyone who managed to miss the Mishima-ish themes (affronted honor, repressed homosexuality) of Nagisa Oshima’s Second World War drama Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence , in which Bowie played imprisoned British officer Major Jack Celliers, could find elucidation in the title of David Sylvian and Ryuichi Sakamoto’s haunting theme song—“Forbidden Colors,” after Mishima’s novel of the same name. Bowie himself returned to Mishima on 2013’s The Next Day , borrowing Spring Snow ’s ominous image of a dead dog obstructing a waterfall for the lyrics of the sparse, Scott Walker–style “Heat.”

Read it while listening to: “Blackout”

If you like this, try: Yukio Mishima, Confessions of a Mask

James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (1963)

The song “Black Tie, White Noise” from the 1993 album of that name is one of Bowie’s least elliptical lyrics and represents perhaps his most personal statement on the subject of race. Hiding from the 1992 LA riots in a hotel room, the recently married Bowie and Iman are having sex. But in the thick of this intimate moment Bowie looks into his Somali wife’s eyes and wonders if, despite being a well-meaning white liberal, he really understands her blackness, or if he’s living in a Benetton-advert multicultural fantasy world. He hints that he is scared himself, as a famous white man, by the rioting black crowds below. Assuming there’s a part of Iman that shares their anger, is any of it directed at him? In an astonishing line which he repeats three times, Bowie reassures himself that Iman—and by extension Al B. Sure!, with whom he is duetting and who functions as a sort of proxy for Iman in the song—will not kill him. Then he admits he sometimes wonders why she won’t, given white people’s appalling racism and mistreatment of black people through the centuries.

Of course, the reason Iman won’t kill him is because she loves him. And as James Baldwin assures us in The Fire Next Time , one of the wisest polemics ever written, “Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.”

The book, which is in two parts, had its roots in a letter to Baldwin’s nephew on the centenary of black America’s “emancipation.” The elegance of Baldwin’s sentences, with their teeming subclauses and rich biblical cadences, is a function of anger, the same anger that energized the LA rioters. It is also a desperate need to cancel out the real white noise—the spurious national mythology white people invoke to convince themselves that their ancestors were wise, fair-minded heroes who always treated their neighbors and ethnic minority populations honorably.

Baldwin has news for his nephew: it’s not for white people to decide it’s within their gift to accept him. Nor should he try to impersonate them in any way or be tempted to believe that he is what the white world thinks he is—inferior. Why should black people have respect for the standards by which white people claim to live when it’s clear those standards are illusory?

He sounds implacable. Yet Baldwin, like Bowie, believes that the future has to be postracial. Hybrid. Tolerant. There can be no frisson of shock, no disapproval on either side, when it comes to interracial marriage and mixed-race children. When, in the book, Baldwin meets with Elijah Muhammad of the separatist Nation of Islam, he understands the doctrine of black self-sufficiency and self-respect Muhammad preaches but is suspicious of the groupthink he inspires in his followers. Baldwin has white friends he would trust with his life. Can he set this fact against the historic evilness of white people? Muhammad would say no. But for Baldwin there is no other way forward.

There is an invented aspect to racial difference, Baldwin felt. Which is how it becomes a tool of oppression: “Color is not a human or a personal reality. It is a political reality.” Views like this set him apart from the radical black movements of the late 60s and early 70s, some of whose followers and leaders—Eldridge Cleaver, for example—saw Baldwin’s homosexuality as deeply suspect, even treasonous. Baldwin had no wish to be typecast, or to be a spokesman—hence his move to France at the age of 24.

Plenty of the books on Bowie’s list are thrilling, fun, or informative. Many of them are important. The Fire Next Time is essential.

Read it while listening to : “Black Tie, White Noise”

If you like this, try: James Baldwin, Another Country

———————————————

From Bowie’s Bookshelf: The Hundred Books that Changed David Bowie’s Life by John O’Connell. Copyright © 2019 by John O’Connell. Reprinted by permission of Gallery Books, An Imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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• Albumography
• Miscellaneous
• Bowie on Film

Book by book, year by year, the ultimate literary trip through Bowie’s greatest decade.

Darkness looms in 1974. It could be the winter energy crisis. It could be The Exorcist. Or it could be the shock that Britain’s biggest pop star, David Bowie, is about to leave its shores for good.

Bidding the corpse of glam, Ziggy’s haircut and loyal ‘Bowietania’ farewell, the plan is to storm America with his highly theatrical Diamond Dogs tour. But by opening night he’s already wishing he was Barry White instead. Then there’s that nasty sniff he can’t get rid of. And that fly in his milk. And the suspicion that, much like every other teen idol named David, fame is driving him completely out of his mind …

London – Friday 10th May, book launch party for ‘Bowie Odyssey 74’

The London book launch will be held at The Social in the heart of London, on the 10th May. The New Cue hosts the launch of  Bowie Odyssey 74 , the fifth volume in Simon Goddard’s epic 10-book series following the Starman through the 70s. 

Simon will be talking to journalist and author Ted Kessler and signing copies.

Tickets available here.

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Alias David Bowie : a biography Hardcover – January 1, 1987

• Print length 511 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Henry Holt & Co
• Publication date January 1, 1987
• ISBN-10 0805003908
• ISBN-13 978-0805003901
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Henry Holt & Co; First American Edition Stated (January 1, 1987)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 511 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0805003908
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0805003901
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2 pounds
• #109,847 in Music (Books)

About the author

Peter gillman.

Peter Gillman was born in Bromley, Kent, in 1942. He attended Hawes Down school, Dulwich College (1953-61), and University College Oxford (1961-64). He was editor of Isis magazine at Oxford. He became a journalist on leaving Oxford and was soon writing for the Sunday Times, first as a freelance, then on the staff, where he spent five years on the newspaper's Insight team. He became a freelance journalist in 1983 and has written for most British newspapers since. He has also written or co-authored a number of books, including Eiger Direct (with Dougal Haston) (published 1966); The Plumbat Affair (with Paul Eddy and Elaine Davenport) (1978); The Falklands War (with Paul Eddy and Magnus Linklater) (1982); Collar the Lot, co-authored with his wife Leni Gillman (1980); Alias David Bowie, with Leni Gillman (1986); The Duty Men (1987); In Balance: 20 years of mountaineering journalism (1989); Everest: the best writing and pictures (1993); The Wildest Dream (biography of mountaineer George Mallory) with Leni Gillman (2000) - winner of Boardman Tasker prize for mountain writing; Everest: 80 years of triumph and tragedy (2001). He has a specialism in mountain writing and has won a record six annual awards from the Outdoor Writers Guild. He has worked in television and cinema and also works as a trainer in journalism and writing. See website www.peterleni.com

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The Little Guide to David Bowie: Words of wit and wisdom from the Starman

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192 pages, Kindle Edition

Published August 31, 2023

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