Jane Eisner’s biog­ra­phy of Car­ole King for the Yale Jew­ish Lives series offers an illu­mi­nat­ing por­trait of the ground­break­ing artist. Eis­ner fol­lows King’s ear­ly career as a teenaged com­pos­er of chart-top­ping pop songs in the ear­ly 1960s, and lat­er, as a bril­liant singer-songwriter.

King still per­forms today, although she has a ​“deep-seat­ed fear of expo­sure.” Eis­ner had lim­it­ed access to King, but she nar­rates a deeply mov­ing, often per­son­al account of King’s life and career, fil­tered through her own long-stand­ing pas­sion for King’s music. Indeed, Eis­ner con­fess­es that in prepar­ing to write the biog­ra­phy, she took piano lessons for two years. Her com­mit­ment pays off, espe­cial­ly in her tech­ni­cal­ly astute, the­mat­i­cal­ly rich analy­sis of the songs on Tapes­try, King’s break­through album. 

Eis­ner charts King’s life chrono­log­i­cal­ly, begin­ning with her child­hood in Sheepshead Bay, a neigh­bor­hood in Brook­lyn with a sig­nif­i­cant Jew­ish pop­u­la­tion; through a painful, ulti­mate­ly abridged ado­les­cence; through her mar­riage to Ger­ry Gof­fin, her lyri­cist part­ner, when she was only sev­en­teen; to moth­er­hood (King had two daugh­ters by the age of twenty). 

Even with these ear­ly chal­lenges, Eis­ner argues that, from the begin­ning, King pos­sessed ​“an aware­ness of iden­ti­ty and celebri­ty” and a ​“fierce ambi­tion” to suc­ceed. In this respect, the cru­cible of mid­dle-class Jew­ish Brook­lyn was fun­da­men­tal to the ​“ambi­tion bub­bling inside” her. Draw­ing on the work of his­to­ri­an Neal Gabler, Eis­ner asserts that the ris­ing gen­er­a­tion of assim­i­lat­ing, dri­ven Jew­ish mid­dle-class youth ben­e­fit­ed from the cre­ative zone ​“where Jew­ish­ness and Amer­i­ca con­verged.” Nowhere was this clear­er than in the emerg­ing pop­u­lar music busi­ness of mid-twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry New York. Jew­ish artists like King and Gof­fin, Eis­ner con­cludes, shaped the nation’s musi­cal taste as their tunes cap­tured the beat and the imag­i­na­tion of America’s youth culture. 

The cat­a­logue of King and Goffin’s canon­i­cal col­lab­o­ra­tions in the six­ties is well-known, but it remains tru­ly remark­able. Eis­ner show­cas­es her own inter­pre­tive prowess, sit­u­at­ing these pop mas­ter­pieces with­in their par­tic­u­lar moment in King’s pro­fes­sion­al life.

The strongest sec­tion of Car­ole King is Eisner’s close read­ing of Tapes­try, the solo album that launched King into the pan­theon of major singer-song­writ­ers. Avid fans often note the life-trans­form­ing expe­ri­ence of lis­ten­ing to Tapes­try—of wear­ing out the vinyl, of being seduced by the album’s invi­ta­tion to join King on an unfold­ing spir­i­tu­al journey. 

After Tapes­try​’s enor­mous suc­cess, King’s per­son­al and cre­ative life took var­i­ous turns — some dis­as­trous — which read­ers of Car­ole King will find fas­ci­nat­ing and no doubt sad­den­ing. With­out delv­ing too deeply into pos­si­ble caus­es, Eis­ner notes King’s ​“unhealthy attach­ment to errat­ic sur­vival­ist men” and her ​“self-destruc­tive cycle of depen­den­cy and abuse.” We are left won­der­ing what hap­pened, emo­tion­al­ly and artis­ti­cal­ly, to the bril­liant young woman who, a half-cen­tu­ry ago, made the earth move.

Now in her ear­ly eight­ies, King has ​“qui­et­ly, episod­i­cal­ly, returned to her Jew­ish roots at times of joy and sor­row.” In Eisner’s telling, King’s Jew­ish upbring­ing and iden­ti­ty have con­tributed to her stature as ​“pos­si­bly the most suc­cess­ful and prized female singer-song­writer in Amer­i­can pop­u­lar culture.”