Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

THE NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER
'Writing about yourself is a funny business...But in a project like this, the writer has made one promise, to show the reader his mind. In these pages, I've tried to do this.' --Bruce Springsteen, from the pages of Born to Run
In 2009, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band performed at the Super Bowl's halftime show. The experience was so exhilarating that Bruce decided to write about it. That's how this extraordinary autobiography began. Over the past seven years, Bruce Springsteen has privately devoted himself to writing the story of his life, bringing to these pages the same honesty, humour and originality found in his songs.
He describes growing up Catholic in Freehold, New Jersey, amid the poetry, danger and darkness that fuelled his imagination, leading up to the moment he refers to as 'The Big Bang': seeing Elvis Presley's debut on The Ed Sullivan Show . He vividly recounts his relentless drive to become a musician, his early days as a bar band king in Asbury Park, and the rise of the E Street Band. With disarming candour, he also tells for the first time the story of the personal struggles that inspired his best work, and shows us why the song 'Born to Run' reveals more than we previously realized.
Born to Run will be revelatory for anyone who has ever enjoyed Bruce Springsteen, but this book is much more than a legendary rock star's memoir. This is a book for workers and dreamers, parents and children, lovers and loners, artists, freaks or anyone who has ever wanted to be baptized in the holy river of rock and roll. Rarely has a performer told his own story with such force and sweep. Like many of his songs ('Thunder Road', 'Badlands', 'Darkness on the Edge of Town', 'The River', 'Born in the U.S.A.', 'The Rising', and 'The Ghost of Tom Joad', to name just a few), Bruce Springsteen's autobiography is written with the lyricism of a singular songwriter and the wisdom of a man who has thought deeply about his experiences.

Excerpt provided by Syndetics

Foreword   I come from a boardwalk town where almost everything is tinged with a bit of fraud. So am I. By twenty, no race-car-driving rebel, I was a guitar player on the streets of Asbury Park and already a member in good standing amongst those who "lie" in service of the truth . . . artists, with a small "a." But I held four clean aces. I had youth, almost a decade of hard-core bar band experience, a good group of homegrown musicians who were attuned to my performance style and a story to tell. This book is both a continuation of that story and a search into its origins. I've taken as my parameters the events in my life I believe shaped that story and my performance work. One of the questions I'm asked over and over again by fans on the street is "How do you do it?" In the following pages I will try to shed a little light on how and, more important, why. DNA, natural ability, study of craft, development of and devotion to an aesthetic philosophy, naked desire for . . . fame? . . . love? . . . admiration? . . . attention? . . . women? . . . sex? . . . and oh, yeah . . . a buck. Then . . . if you want to take it all the way out to the end of the night, a furious fire in the hole that just . . . don't . . . quit . . . burning. These are some of the elements that will come in handy should you come face-to-face with eighty thousand (or eighty) screaming rock 'n' roll fans who are waiting for you to do your magic trick. Waiting for you to pull something out of your hat, out of thin air, out of this world, something that before the faithful were gathered here today was just a song-fueled rumor. I am here to provide proof of life to that ever elusive, never completely believable "us." That is my magic trick. And like all good magic tricks, it begins with a setup. So...   One My Street   I am ten years old and I know every crack, bone and crevice in the crumbling sidewalk running up and down Randolph Street, my street. Here, on passing afternoons I am Hannibal crossing the Alps, GIs locked in vicious mountain combat and countless cowboy heroes traversing the rocky trails of the Sierra Nevada. With my belly to the stone, alongside the tiny anthills that pop up volcanically where dirt and concrete meet, my world sprawls on into infinity, or at least to Peter McDermott's house on the corner of Lincoln and Randolph, one block up. On these streets I have been rolled in my baby carriage, learned to walk, been taught by my grandfather to ride a bike, and fought and run from some of my first fights. I learned the depth and comfort of real friendships, felt my early sexual stirrings and, on the evenings before air-conditioning, watched the porches fill with neighbors seeking conversation and respite from the summer heat. Here, in epic "gutter ball" tournaments, I slammed the first of a hundred Pinky rubber balls into my sidewalk's finely shaped curb. I climbed upon piles of dirty snow, swept high by midnight plows, walking corner to corner, the Edmund Hillary of New Jersey. My sister and I regularly stood like sideshow gawkers peering in through the huge wooden doors of our corner church, witnessing an eternal parade of baptisms, weddings and funerals. I followed my handsome, raggedly elegant grandfather as he tottered precariously around the block, left arm paralyzed against his chest, getting his "exercise" after a debilitating stroke he never came back from. In our front yard, only feet from our porch, stands the grandest tree in town, a towering copper beech. Its province over our home is such that one bolt of well-placed lightning and we'd all be dead as snails crushed beneath God's little finger. On  nights when thunder  rolls and lightning turns our family bedroom cobalt blue, I watch its arms move and come to life in the wind and white flashes as I lie awake worrying about my friend the monster outside. On sunny days, its roots are a fort for my soldiers, a corral for my horses and my second home. I hold the honor of being the first on our block to climb into its upper reaches. Here I find my escape from all below. I wander for hours amongst its branches, the sound of my buddies' muted voices drifting up from the sidewalk below as they try to track my progress. Beneath its slumbering arms, on slow summer nights we sit, my pals and I, the cavalry at dusk, waiting for the evening bells of the ice-cream man and bed. I hear my grandmother's voice calling me in, the last sound of the long day. I step up onto our front porch, our windows glowing in the summer twilight; I let the heavy front door open and then close behind me, and for an hour or so in front of the kerosene stove, with my grandfather in his big chair, we watch the small black-and-white television screen light up the room, throwing its specters upon the walls and ceiling. Then, I drift to sleep tucked inside the greatest and saddest sanctuary I have ever known, my grandparents' house. I live here with my sister, Virginia, one year younger; my parents, Adele and Douglas Springsteen; my grandparents, Fred and Alice; and my dog Saddle. We live, literally, in the bosom of the Catholic Church, with the priest's rectory, the nuns' convent, the St. Rose of Lima Church and gram- mar school all just a football's toss away across a field of wild grass. Though he towers above us, here God is surrounded by man--crazy men, to be exact. My family has five houses branching out in an L shape, anchored on the corner by the redbrick church. We are four houses of old- school Irish, the people who have raised me--McNicholases, O'Hagans, Farrells--and across the street, one lonely outpost of Italians, who peppered my upbringing. These are the Sorrentinos and the Zerillis, hailing from Sorrento, Italy, via Brooklyn via Ellis Island. Here dwell my mother's mother, Adelina Rosa Zerilli; my mother's older sister, Dora; Dora's husband, Warren (an Irishman of course); and their daughter, my older cousin Margaret. Margaret and my cousin Frank are championship jitterbug dancers, winning contests and trophies up and down the Jersey Shore. Though not unfriendly, the clans do not often cross the street to socialize with one another. The house I live in with my grandparents is owned by my great- grandmother "Nana" McNicholas, my grandmother's mother, alive and kicking just up the street. I've been told our town's first church service and first funeral were held in our living room. We live here beneath the lingering eyes of my father's older sister, my aunt Virginia, dead at five, killed by a truck while riding her tricycle past the corner gas station. Her portrait hovers, breathing a ghostly air into the room and shining her ill-fated destiny over our family gatherings. Hers is a sepia-toned formal portrait of a little girl in an old-fashioned child's white linen dress. Her seemingly benign gaze, in the light of events, now communicates, "Watch out! The world is a dangerous and unforgiving place that will knock your ass off your tricycle and into the dead black unknown and only these poor, misguided and unfortunate souls will miss you." Her mother,  my grandma, heard that message loud and clear. She spent two years in bed after her daughter's death and sent my father, neglected, with rickets, off to the outskirts of town to live with other relatives while she recovered. Time passed; my father quit school at sixteen, working as a floor boy in the Karagheusian Rug Mill, a clanging factory of looms and deafening machinery that stretched across both sides of Center Street in a part of town called "Texas." At eighteen, he went to war, sailing on the Queen Mary out of New York City. He served as a truck driver at the Battle of the Bulge, saw what little of the world he was going to see and returned home. He played pool, very well, for money. He met and fell in love with my mother, promising that if she'd marry him, he'd get a real job (red flag!). He worked with his cousin, David "Dim" Cashion, on the line at the Ford Motor plant in Edison and I came along. For my grandmother, I was the firstborn child of her only son and the first baby in the house since the death of her daughter. My birth re- turned to her a life of purpose. She seized on me with a vengeance. Her mission became my ultimate protection from the world within and with- out. Sadly, her blind single-minded devotion would lead to hard feelings with my father and enormous family confusion. It would drag all of us down. When it rains, the moisture in the humid air blankets our town with the smell of damp coffee grounds wafting in from the Nescafé factory at the town's eastern edge. I don't like coffee but I like that smell. It's com- forting; it unites the town in a common sensory experience; it's good industry, like the roaring rug mill that fills our ears, brings work and signals our town's vitality. There is a place here--you can hear it, smell it--where people make lives, suffer pain, enjoy small pleasures, play baseball, die, make love, have kids, drink  themselves drunk  on spring nights and do their best to hold off the demons that seek to destroy us, our homes, our families, our town. Here  we  live in  the  shadow  of the  steeple,  where  the  holy  rubber meets the road, all crookedly blessed in God's  mercy, in the heart-stopping, pants-dropping, race-riot-creating, oddball-hating, soul-shaking, love-and­ fear-making, heartbreaking town of Freehold, New Jersey. Let the service begin.    Two My House   It's Thursday night, trash night.  We are fully mobilized and ready to go. We have gathered in my grandfather's 1940s sedan waiting to be deployed to dig through every trash heap overflowing from the curbs of our town. First, we're heading to Brinckerhoff Avenue; that's where the money is and the trash is finest. We have come for your radios, any radios, no matter the condition.  We will scavenge them from your junk pile, throw them into the trunk and bring them home to "the shed," my grandfather's six-by-six-foot unheated wooden cubicle in a tiny corner of our house. Here, winter and summer, magic occurs. Here in a "room" filled with electrical wire and filament tubes, I will sit studiously at his side. While he wires, solders and exchanges bad tubes for good, we wait together for the same moment: that instant when the whispering breath, the beautiful low static hum and warm sundown  glow of electricity will come surging back into the dead skeletons of radios we have pulled back from extinction.   Here at my grandfather's workbench, the resurrection is real. The vacuum silence will be drawn up and filled with the distant, crackling voices of Sunday preachers, blabbering pitchmen, Big Band music, early rock 'n' roll and serial dramas. It is the sound of the world outside straining to reach us, calling down into our little town and deeper, into our hermetically sealed universe here at 87 Randolph Street. Once returned to the living, all items will be sold for five dollars in the migrant camps that, come summer,  will dot the farm fields on the edge of our borough. The "radio man" is coming. That's how my grandfather is known amongst the mostly Southern black migrant population that returns by bus every season to harvest the crops of rural Monmouth County. Down the dirt farm roads to the shacks in the rear where dust-bowl thirties conditions live on, my mother drives my stroke- addled grandpa to do his business amongst "the blacks" in their "Mickey Mouse" camps. I went once and was frightened out of my wits, surrounded in the dusk by hard-worn black faces. Race relations, never great in Free- hold, will explode ten years later into rioting and shootings, but for now, there is just a steady, uncomfortable  quiet. I am simply the young protégé grandson of the "radio man," here amongst his patrons where my family scrambles to make ends meet. We were pretty near poor, though I never thought about it. We were clothed, fed and bedded. I had white and black friends worse off. My parents had jobs, my mother as a legal secretary and my father at Ford. Our house was old and soon to be noticeably decrepit. One kerosene stove in the living room was all we had to heat the whole place. Upstairs, where my family slept, you woke on winter mornings with your breath visible. One of my earliest childhood memories is the smell of kerosene and my grandfather standing there filling the spout in the rear of the stove. All of our cooking was done on a coal stove in the kitchen; as a child I'd shoot my water gun at its hot iron surface and watch the steam rise. We'd haul the ashes out the back door to the "ash heap." Daily I'd return from playing in that pile of dust pale from gray coal ash. We had a small box refrigerator and one of the first televisions in town. In an earlier life, before I was born, my granddad had been the proprietor of Springsteen Brothers Electrical Shop. So when TV hit, it arrived at our house first. My mother told me neighbors from up and down the block would stop by to see the new miracle, to watch Milton Berle, Kate Smith and Your Hit Parade . To see wrestlers like Bruno Sammartino face off against Haystacks Calhoun. By the time I was six I knew every word to the Kate Smith anthem, "When the Moon Comes Over the Mountain." In this house, due to order of birth and circumstance, I was lord, king and the messiah all rolled into one. Because I was the first grandchild, my grandmother  latched on to me to replace my dead aunt Virginia. Nothing was out of bounds. It was a terrible freedom for a young boy and I embraced it with everything I had. I stayed up until three a.m. and slept until three p.m. at five and six years old. I watched TV until it went off and I was left staring alone at the test pattern. I ate what and when I wanted. My parents and I became distant relatives and my mother, in her confusion and desire to keep the peace, ceded me to my grandmother's total dominion. A timid little tyrant, I soon felt like the rules were for the rest of the world, at least until my dad came home. He would lord sullenly over the kitchen, a monarch dethroned by his own firstborn son at his mother's insistence. Our ruin of a house and my own eccentricities and power at such a young age shamed and embarrassed me. I could see the rest of the world was running on a different clock and I was teased for my habits pretty thoroughly by my neighborhood pals. I loved my entitlement, but I knew it wasn't right. When I became of school age and had to conform to a time schedule, it sent me into an inner rage that lasted most of my school years. My mother knew we were all way overdue for a reckoning and, to her credit, tried to reclaim me. She moved us out of my grandmother's house to a small, half- shotgun-style house at 39½ Institute Street. No hot water, four tiny rooms, four blocks away from my grandparents. There she tried to set some normal boundaries. It was too late. Those four blocks might as well have been a million miles. I was roaring with anger and loss and every chance I got, I returned to stay with my grandparents. It was my true home and they felt like my real parents. I could and would not leave. The house by now was functional only in one room, the living room. The rest of the house, abandoned and draped off, was falling down, with one wintry and windblown bathroom, the only place to relieve yourself, and no functioning bath. My grandparents fell into a state of poor hygiene and care that would shock and repel me now. I remember my grandmother's soiled undergarments, just washed, hanging on the backyard line, frightening and embarrassing me, symbols of the inappropriate intimacies, physical and emotional, that made my grandparents' home so confusing and compelling. But I loved them and that house. My grandma slept on a worn spring couch with me tucked in at her side while my grandfather had a small cot across the room. This was it. This was what it had come to, my childhood limitlessness. This was where I needed to be to feel at home, safe, loved. The grinding hypnotic power of this ruined place and these people would never leave me. I visit it in my dreams today, returning over and over, wanting to go back. It was a place where I felt an ultimate security, full license and a horrible unforgettable boundary-less love. It ruined me and it made me. Ruined, in that for the rest of my life I would struggle to create boundaries for myself that would allow me a life of some normalcy in my relationships. It made me in the sense that it would set me off on a lifelong pursuit of a "singular" place of my own, giving me a raw hunger that drove me, hell-bent, in my music. It was a desperate, lifelong effort to rebuild, on embers of memory and longing, my temple of safety. For my grandmother's love, I abandoned my parents, my sister and much of the world itself. Then that world came crashing in. My grandparents became ill. The whole family moved in together again, to another half house, at 68 South Street. Soon, my younger sister, Pam, would be born, my grandfather would be dead and my grandmother would be filled with cancer. My house, my backyard, my tree, my dirt, my earth, my sanctuary would be condemned  and the land sold, to be made into a parking lot for St. Rose of Lima Catholic church.     Excerpted from Born to Run by Bruce Springsteen All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Whomever critics deem the voice of his or her generation too often eventually fade into the woodwork or struggle to keep pace with the next musical trend. Springsteen has on rare occasion delivered a more pop sound ("Dancing in the Dark") and addressed issues of social justice ("Philadelphia"), but as his autobiography suggests, he has never struggled as have so many artists to maintain relevance and popularity. The Boss's real challenge has been on the personal side, for he, like some in his family, has dealt with depression. Doing a serviceable job at narration, Springsteen delves into his creative process and sheds light on his rise from bar bands to the Super Bowl halftime show. It is an energetic, anthemic ride, worthy of listening to full blast on a thunder road of one's choosing. Verdict Highly recommended. ["A rollicking ride from the glorious and the emotional to the fun and soaring; one of rock's finest and most memorable memoirs": LJ Xpress Reviews 10/28/16 review of the S. & S. hc.]-Kelly Sinclair, Temple P.L., TX © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

In his long-awaited memoir, Springsteen takes readers on an entertaining, high-octane journey from the streets of New Jersey to all over the world. A natural storyteller, Springsteen commands our attention, regaling us with his tales of growing up poor with a misanthropic father and a mother who had endless faith in people. The Boss delights us with humorous stories of his first guitar-which he couldn't get his seven-year-old fingers around-and his inspiration to become a musician after seeing Elvis on The Ed Sullivan Show: "I WANTED... I NEEDED... TO ROCK! NOW!" Once he's hooked, he can't give up this insatiable hunger to rock like Chuck Berry, or the Rolling Stones, or the Beatles; soon he's playing in his first band, the Castiles, and eventually with another band, Steel Mill, opening up for Grand Funk Railroad, Ike & Tina Turner, and Iron Butterfly. Springsteen weaves a captivating story, introducing us to the essential people in his life: Patti Scialfa, Clarence Clemons, Steven Van Zandt, and producer/managers Mike Appel and Jon Landau, among many others. He offers absorbing accounts of the making of each album, and he considers Born to Run as the dividing line between musical styles, as well as the mark of the beginning of his success; he also admits that his bands were never democracies and that he makes the decisions. Most insightful, he reveals his ongoing battles with depression-"shortly after my sixtieth I slipped into a depression like I hadn't experienced"-and his eventual ability to live with this condition. Springsteen writes with the same powerful lyrical quality of his music. (Sept. 27) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Booklist Review

*Starred Review* Has anyone in contemporary pop culture pursued the rock 'n' roll life with such determination as Bruce Springsteen? He has said he had no choice since he couldn't do anything else. In this long (but not long enough) and entertaining autobiography, Springsteen begins in his hometown of Freehold, New Jersey, on Randolph Street (my street). This is where he grew up. This is where he learned the ways of the world as filtered through his pessimistic father and optimistic mother and the extended family of people descended mostly from Irish and Italian immigrants and a grandmother who spoiled him with unconditional love. He describes the sounds and smells of his New Jersey home as well as the family's constant struggle to get by (We were pretty poor, though I never thought about it). The dark poetry of Catholicism first kindled his imagination and would serve as a source of imagery for many of his songs. He also shares early memories of his father, sitting along with other men in silence in a smoke-filled bar, his powerful legs, a face slightly discolored and misshapen by alcohol, and always suggesting the possibility of violence. His relationship with his moody father became the topic of many of his songs and in these pages he conjures up images of him with equal amounts of fear, anger, respect, and, ultimately, love. But he makes it clear that his father did not understand the young Bruce: When my dad looked at me, he didn't see what he needed to see. This was my crime. From his gregarious mother he learned what it meant to be truthful, kind, and compassionate, and to have pride in yourself and your work. And from her side of the family, he also learned that he loved to entertain. Springsteen discusses with great honesty his own shortcomings, including his long-held fear of relationships, his passive-aggressiveness, and his capacity for emotional cruelty. Like other family members, a black melancholy hung over him. Bouts of depression occurred numerous times over the decades: first when he was 16 and again shortly after his 60th birthday and, most devastatingly, a few years ago. He also makes light of his singing voice. I have a bar-man's power, range and durability . . . . My voice gets the job done. Much here will be well known to most Springsteen fans, but what makes it different, what makes it stand out, is to read Springsteen's own take on familiar events, whether watching Elvis on The Ed Sullivan Show, meeting the iconic E Street sax man Clarence Clemons for the first time (It was a dark and stormy night), or his audition for the legendary John Hammond at Columbia Records. He discusses each album in chronological order, as well as the endless touring. But Born to Run is singular, like its author. Anyone who knows Springsteen's songs will recognize his voice: the cadences, the rhythms all recall his unique songwriting style. It is also full of small and big insights. Like his songs, one sentence can reveal everything you need to know about his upbringing (I never saw a man leave a house in a jacket and tie unless it was Sunday or he was in trouble). Despite his seriousness, Springsteen often acts the clown: goofy, self-deprecating, and humble. The memoir shows this side of his big personality in funny little comments and asides. And so many of his sentences sing, such as when he describes the birth of his youngest child, Sam, as having a moon-round kisser, Irish to the bone. As he grew older, he looked like a Joycean urchin off the streets of Dublin. Through the magic of his songs, and now the wizardry of his prose, Springsteen has healed many a heart by reimagining moments from his own life. I'm a repairman, he writes. That's part of my job. Touching and full of light and shadows, Born to Run will bring tears and laughter to even the most cursory of Springsteen fans.--Sawyers, June Copyright 2016 Booklist