Ronnie James Dio: A Biography of a Heavy Metal Icon by James Curl

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


First, I have to say this was an amazingly quick book to read (I read it in two days and easily could have done it in one) and I really enjoyed it. However, it has a lot of problems, the main one being that it reads like a Reader's Digest version of Dio's life. There is only one chapter (roughly 10-14 pages long) that covers his time with Rainbow and another for Sabbath. Surely, there's more to tell. I've no doubt we're missing out on plenty of anecdotes and stories. The author kind of hits on Ronnie joining, putting out the first album and then rushing through the rest until his departure.

Also, one of the aspects of Dio's life that I've always been curious about is his relationship with Wendy and we get almost no insight into that here. The author discusses their marriage and a tumultuous time in their relationship when it seems as though they're breaking up, but that's it. Decades pass without hardly any mention of her or Ronnie's relationship to her. Obviously, they had a business partnership and they never divorced, but there's so much missing.

While the author seems to have done a good job interviewing Dio's friends and bandmates, he also quotes from Wikipedia. To me, this feels a bit lazy.

Lastly, for some reason about halfway through the book there were suddenly a fair amount of typos. They seem confined to the middle section so maybe someone didn't proofread as carefully. A rather minor point overall, but always worth mentioning since they do take you out of the work.

Despite these problems and even though I would much prefer a longer, more thorough biography, one of the things that prompted the author to write this book was that there were no other biography's of Dio. So I'll happily take this over nothing.



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