Randi Massingill's biography on Michael Nesmith -- musician, actor, and visionary -- is the only one available on this seminal figure in pop culture and thus fills a gaping need. While engaging and accurate as far as basic facts go, there is not much in-depth analysis presented and little surrounding context to Nesmith's career and life. His music and filmmaking are not examined in the detail which they cry out for. It's a good book for a biographical overview and some observations from some of Nesmith's associates, but there is little direct input from the subject himself (as Massingill makes clear in her introduction, Nesmith avoided involvement, as did some of his closest compadres). There is, however, much material drawn from archival interviews with the other Monkees and Nesmith's first wife, Phyllis. The manuscript would have benefited from tighter editing. For example, although there are discographies and filmographies in the appendixes, in the main body the author frequently neglects to mention the dates of releases or events being described, making it unclear when important milestones have occurred. Massingill's prose betrays some awkwardness in places: among the clunkers that jumped out to me are sentences such as, "the completed 'Timerider' would sit on the shelf for a while so a distributor could be found," "Michael had several movies lined up for which he was going to serve as executive producer, but after time they vanished from the scene," "Michael's appearance would insure [sic] that they would get some publicity," and "it was astounding to the completest [sic] Nesmith collectors". And the presentation could stand some improvement. Don't let go of your first (1997) edition; many photographs have been changed, the text has been entirely reformatted, but most hurtfully, the reproduction quality of the pictures is substandard. The first, offset-printed edition offered acceptable image reproduction, but in this print-on-demand edition the images are sometimes grainy or indistinct, looking like photocopies of newspaper clippings. Possibly this can be addressed in the future as printing technology improves.
