Waging Heavy Peace: A Hippie Dream by Neil Young

(Blue Rider, $30)

It’s a shame that few people who aren’t already fans will read Neil Young’s new memoir, said Wesley Stace in The Wall Street Journal. The legendary Canadian folkie-rocker has written a “terrific” book—one that’s “modest, honest, funny,” and a charming antidote to the self-mythologizing common in other pop-star self-portraits. If you were handed a list of the subjects Young gives most of his attention to, you’d be unhappy to learn that music falls somewhere after the many cars he’s owned and PureTone, the digital audio format that he’s developing to improve on MP3. But there’s much to be said for a work that’s at times erratic, conversational, and “comically repetitive.” In some ways, “the closest antecedent to Waging Heavy Peace may be Laurence Sterne’s 1760 masterpiece, Tristram Shandy.”

Longtime Young fans won’t feel cheated, said Jeff Miers in The Buffalo News. He “writes graciously and with a generosity of spirit” about his time spent recording and performing with Buffalo Springfield, the super group Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, and his longtime backing band, Crazy Horse. He supplies “plenty of amusing anecdotes” as well as some “profoundly emotional” passages about friends and collaborators who’ve died along the way. What holds it all together is his focus on two enduring passions—for the family he’s built with his wife, Pegi, and for his art.

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Young wrote the book at a curious moment in his life, said Simon Vozick-Levinson in Rolling Stone. He had recently given up booze and weed for the first time in decades, and as he hit a dry spell with his songwriting, he was clearly “haunted by his late father’s descent into dementia” and “the idea that he might end up the same way.” But don’t ever underestimate the power of Young’s commitment to his so-called “hippie dream,” said Bob Ruggiero in the Houston Chronicle. Not only is he still trying to save music by promoting PureTone (now called Pono). At 66, he’s also back on the road with Crazy Horse, “playing furious, gloriously skuzzy rock ’n’ roll and raging against the dying light.”