Get Happy: The Life of Judy Garland - Biography Book for Music Lovers, Hollywood History Enthusiasts & Classic Film Fans - Perfect for Reading, Gift Giving & Collecting

The drawback with biographies of favourite people is that the reader knows how it all ends before beginning. So I approached this book with trepidation - preparing to be depressed. I was not disappointed.For Judy, there were glorious highs - and lows that would have decimated most people although Judy "recovered" from all but the last. This book is an amalgam of previously published resources and new information including the author's interviews and Judy's own autobiographical musing and ranting into a tape recorder for a book that never was. The book is sometimes disconcerting as it jumps back and forth through the years, sometimes pedantic, and told this reader more that I wanted to know about Judy's sex life. (I hope I can forget the one encounter involving the song or my enjoyment of her singing "Over the Rainbow" will be forever diminished.) As the author says: "More than any other stimulus, [music] awakens sleeping memories."The author, while casting aspersions on Judy's mother and Louis B. Meyer & the MGM system for starting Judy on pills and yo-yo dieting , himself seems fixated with Judy's constantly fluctuating weight. There is a picture on page 346 of a bloatedly ill Judy that one would think would do more to motivate dieters and fitness wannabes more than any exhortations by Richard Simmons or Sarah Fergason. Just put a copy of that picture on your freezer door - you won't want to reach in to grab Haagen-Daz!When Judy was "on" she was brilliant. The author points out that for most of her life "In those days, there were no drugs to fight depression - the first antidepressant, Iproniazid, did not come on to the market until 1957." Later in the book, he speculates that Judy was "probably bi-polar." How different could it have been if only ...