Gift Guide: Wrinkled Ex-Junkie Rocker Writes One of the Best Memoirs Ever

From Movieline's 2010 Holiday Gift Guide:

It's an understatement to call Keith Richards' Life one of the most charming memoirs of the year. This could be one of the most charming memoirs ever written: a book that's frank, affectionate, sharply observed (especially for a guy who spent the good part of a decade in a cocaine-and-heroin whirlwind) and, best of all, outlandishly, wickedly funny.

Richards starts at the very beginning, with his childhood in rough and tumble Dartford, moves deftly through his teenage years when he fell in love the blues, and covers, with unflappable candor, the resplendent ups and muddy-water downs of the Rolling Stones. Richards spins raucous, ridiculous stories about arrests, tells tender stories about lost loves, and gives away valuable guitar-playing secrets that some of you out there may have already spent years trying to unlock on your own. Best of all, though -- and put forth not with bitterness but with honesty -- are Richards' musings about his long-time mate Mick Jagger. Richards airs his frustrations freely, citing Jagger's possessiveness, his lack of trust, his giant ego. "I love the man dearly," he writes. "I'm still his mate. But he makes it very difficult to be his friend." In addition to all of its other fabulous qualities, Life is a deeply honest, and conflicted, account of one hell of a complicated male friendship.

$16.18 @ Amazon