A Cure For Gravity: A Musical Pilgrimage

Now in paperback comes the candid, inspiring memoir of becoming a musician by the renowned composer and pop star. Far from a standard-issue celebrity autobiography, "A Cure for Gravity" is a smart, passionate book about music, the creative process, and coming of age as an artist.

Since the release of his first best-selling album "Look Sharp" in 1979, Joe Jackson has forged a singular career in music through his originality as a composer and his notoriously independent stance toward music-business fashion. He has also been a famously private person, whose lack of interest in his own celebrity has been interpreted by some as aloofness. That reputation is shattered by "A Cure for Gravity," Jackson's enormously funny and revealing memoir of growing up musical, from a culturally impoverished childhood in a rough English port town to the Royal Academy of Music, through London's Punk and New Wave scenes, up to the brink of pop stardom. Jackson describes his life as a teenage Beethoven fanatic; his early piano gigs for audiences of glass-throwing skinheads; and his days on the road with long-forgotten club bands. Far from a standard-issue celebrity autobiography, "A Cure for Gravity" is a smart, passionate book about music, the creative process, and coming of age as an artist.