With the world buzzing over the release of the long-awaited Michael Jackson biopic Michael, one book is more relevant than ever — Einstein, Michael Jackson & Me: A Search for Soul in the Power Pits of Rock and Roll by Howard Bloom. And nobody was better positioned to write it.
Described as “the greatest press agent that rock and roll has ever known,” Bloom founded the biggest PR firm in the music industry, representing icons including Prince, Bob Marley, Peter Gabriel, Billy Joel, Aerosmith, Queen, Run DMC, and Michael Jackson, among over a hundred others. But this book is far more than a career retrospective. It is, at its core, a passionate act of reclamation — a determined effort to give Michael Jackson back his humanity.
Through his firsthand experiences working at the highest levels of the music industry, Bloom reveals Jackson not just as a performer, but as a force of evolutionary change — someone who reshaped global emotion, identity, and connection. Where the media spent decades reducing Jackson to headlines and controversy, Bloom offers something rarer and more valuable: proximity, perspective, and profound respect.
The results are striking. One reader wrote that before picking up the book, they thought of Michael Jackson as little more than a tabloid figure who made catchy songs — but by the final page, they were grieving with tears in their eyes. That transformation is precisely what Bloom intended.
Bloom himself has said: “Michael was an amazing human being. He was a gift to all of us. He spent 50 years on this earth. For the first 25 years, he was becoming Michael Jackson. For the second 25 years of his life, he was dangling on a cross in pain. And that should never, ever have happened to him. He deserved far, far better than that.”
Bloom reflects on the day of Michael Jackson’s death — June 25, 2009 — saying he always felt there were unfinished conversations between them. It took him years to understand why. That sense of unfinished business drives the emotional current of the book, lending it an intimacy that no outside observer could replicate.
As one reviewer noted, Bloom delivers much-needed humanity to megastars, with his words on Michael Jackson making for compelling and, at times, genuinely touching reading. Rather than sensationalize, Bloom contextualizes — placing Jackson within a larger framework of art, science, and the deep human need for connection that music fulfills.
The book has been praised as “the strange tale of a scientific expedition into the dark underbelly where new myths and movements are made,” and Jackson stands at the center of that exploration. In Bloom’s telling, the King of Pop was not a curiosity or a cautionary tale — he was proof of what humanity is capable of when genius, discipline, and soul converge.
As audiences now prepare to see Jackson’s story dramatized on the big screen, Einstein, Michael Jackson & Me remains essential reading — the account of the man who, perhaps more than anyone, saw who Michael Jackson really was, and refused to let the world forget it.
Get your copy of “Einstein, Michael Jackson and Me” on Amazon here: