Catch a Fire: The Life of Bob Marley

After being a fan of Bob Marley's music for years, I decided that I wanted to learn more about the legend. I chose to read Catch a Fire and found it to be an amazing book about an even more amazing person. Not only does it tell everything about the life and times of Bob Marley, but it tells of the origins of reggae and Rastafari. It is a book that I found myself glued to time after time, I just couldn't put it down. The book describes life in Jamaica in an awesome way that makes you feel like your there. I recommend this book to anyone who is even remotely interested in learning more about the Natural Mystic that is Bob Marley.

The man, the myth, the legend, it's all here and some. I read this book several years back and consider it one of my favorite biographies. The author goes into great detail concerning the Honorable Robert Nesta Marley life. He also does a superb job explaining the roots of reggae and all the social and political ramifications surrounding Bob Marley's life. This is a must read for any fan of Bob Marley. The man was much more than the music and in order to understand the full picture an understanding of Jamaica and Rastafarianism is essential. The book recounts all aspects of Jamaican life and how the ambassador of reggae became a super star. A good companion book to this is Songs of Freedom by Adrian Boot. Thanks to fine biographies like this and the plethora of music left behind by Bob Marley it is easy to see why he was so great then and now. His legacy continues to grow as each new generation discovers the Hon. Robert Nesta Marley, the Lion lives on forever!

This is the first biography of Bob marley that I have read. But I have read (and written) numerous biographies of people in popular culture, social history, military history etc. This book is written in a way that is hard to describe - it uses the jamaican patois so cleverly and appropriately that you realise there is no other way the events in Bob's life could have been described. So detailed are the descriptions that it is obvious the author writes from a personal knowledge of Bob, his family, his friends and his musical associates. Absolutely rivetting, and impossible to put down, it stays with you. I listen to the music now with a quite different appreciation of what is going on in the songs.

This book covers it all from the humble beginnings to bob's rise as third world poet and prophet and then to the controversies that occured after his death. White takes much time to tell about the politics and religious issues that help one to understand what is happening and to bridge the cultural gap. In many ways this biography does not paint a comlimentary picture of bob, in many ways it does. It is the truth based on verifiable facts. It's important in a study of this man's life to cut through the varnish of the legend and the myth to what really happened. Bob Marley deserves that much. White takes us right to trenchtown and attempts to paint a complete picture.Life in the kingston ghetto that spawned reggae has a code of it's own. When there was an attempt on bob's life in 1976 it was trenchtown gangs who brought the accused to justice. This story reads like a great novel and never gets boring or stale and that's just one of hundreds of examples. This work is a great study of jamaican life and culture as well as reggae and bob marley. A must read for real fans and the best biography by far of this great man. One reviewer suggested that the book doesn't pay enough attention to bob's rasta faith. Not true, marley's religious faith is the motivation for most of what he does, how he viewed the world. White never misses this point. As bob's world got bigger his perspective on his faith changed. A must read.....................socks

I recently read "Catch a Fire" while on vacation in Jamaica, and found it the best reading choice I could possibly have made. I was awed by Timothy White's success in describing and documenting the cultural, economic, historical, musical, racial, religious and political contexts which spawned Bob Marley. The book is not just an account of one musician's rise to fame, but of the land and society which inspired, sustained, and betrayed him, and which continues to learn and grow from him. Though I lived in Jamaica for many years, I learned much from the book about the culture and history which I never knew before.The book made Bob Marley at once more human and more astounding. It documents the human perils, uncertainties and challenges he encountered and how he dealt with them, sometimes better than others. At the same time, it does not attempt to explain away his genius, inspiration or transcendent powers - those inexplainable qualities which made him extraordinary and which resulted in the ongoing legend which may never stop. The experience of reading the book whilst involved in activities such as touring the Bob Marley Museum in Kingston, listening to his recordings, and discussing Marley with people across the island made it impossible for me not to make mental comparisons between the birth and growth of the legend of Jesus of Nazareth and that of Robert Nesta Marley of Nine Miles.Timothy White has done a superb job of documenting the birth of a legend. As Bob sang and White concluded, "Time Will Tell."