"Poetic musings on a life well-lived--one that is still moving forward, always creating, always luminous. This isn´t your typical autobiography. Garfunkel´s history is told in flowing prose, bounding from present to past, far from a linear rags-to-riches story."
--Bookreporter
"It´s hard to imagine any single word that would accurately describe this book . . . an entertaining volume that´s more fun to read than a conventional memoir might have been."
--The Wall Street Journal
"A charming book of prose and poetry printed in a digitalized version of his handwriting . . . witty, candid, and wildly imaginative . . . A highly intelligent man trying to make sense of his extraordinary life."
--Associated Press
From the golden-haired, curly-headed half of Simon & Garfunkel, a memoir (of sorts)--moving, lyrical impressions, interspersed throughout a narrative, punctuated by poetry, musings, lists of resonant books loved and admired, revealing a life and the making of a musician, that show us, as well, the evolution of a man, a portrait of a life-long friendship and of a collaboration that became the most successful singing duo in the roiling age that embraced, and was defined by, their pathfinding folk-rock music.
In What Is It All but Luminous, Art Garfunkel writes about growing up in the 1940s and ´50s (son of a traveling salesman, listening as his father played Enrico Caruso records), a middle-class Jewish boy, living in a redbrick semi-attached house on Jewel Avenue in Kew Gardens, Queens. He writes of meeting Paul Simon, the kid who made Art laugh (they met at their graduation play, Alice in Wonderland; Paul was the White Rabbit; Art, the Cheshire Cat). Of their being twelve at the birth of rock´n´roll ("it was rhythm and blues. It was black. I was captured and so was Paul"), of a demo of their song, Hey Schoolgirl for seven dollars and the actual record (with Paul´s father on bass) going to #40 on the charts. He writes about their becoming Simon & Garfunkel,