Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

In 1994, as Seattle's Soundgarden prepared to tour behind the album Superunknown, their manager delivered astounding news: the record would debut at number one on the Billboard charts. "It all seemed a little surreal," recalls guitarist Kim Thayil. After a decade of grinding, rock stardom had arrived. "We didn't celebrate,” adds Thayil, “because it was nothing we'd ever contemplated.” Days later, the band was backstage in Paris, sobbing over the death of Kurt Cobain; soon after, Thayil's longtime relationship ended. "It was the peak of my professional life and the low point of my personal one." Such dissonance—between public triumph and private unraveling—animates this candid memoir. Thayil is most compelling tracing the band's creative chemistry: their early attic rehearsals, odd time signatures, and feedback-drenched experimentation that set them apart in Seattle's emerging scene. Fame, by contrast, registers as abstract, even alienating. What matters here is process, not mythology. Charting Soundgarden's rise, breakup, and return, A Screaming Life offers a clear-eyed account of a defining band that resists easy nostalgia, emphasizing the fragile, fleeting nature of artistic connection.

Publishers Weekly
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

In this entertaining memoir, Thayil, cofounder of grunge band Soundgarden, recounts how “two Asian guys and a singing drummer playing psychedelic, feedback-drenched post-punk” blazed musical trails in the 1980s and ’90s. Thayil, the son of Indian immigrants, grew up in the Chicago suburbs in the 1960s. He wrote his first song at age eight; his first band was a punk group he assembled for a senior English project. After high school, Thayil traveled around the country with his friend Hiro Yamamoto, landing in Seattle, where the two formed Soundgarden with their friend Chris Cornell while Thayil earned a philosophy degree. The group’s first album, Ultramega OK (“a heavy record that didn’t rely on dumbass tropes about chicks, parties, and the devil”), was released in 1988, attracting attention from major record labels and their musical heroes. Thayil balances his enthusiasm about the band’s rise with frank discussions about creative conflicts over the group’s hard-rock and psychedelic influences, which contributed to its breakup in 1997. Thayil’s grief over Cornell’s death in 2017 is particularly moving. Readers will find it an amiable and intriguing history of an influential rock group. Agent: Laura Mazer, WSA. (June)