Dancing in My Dreams: A Spiritual Biography of Tina Turner. By Ralph H. Craig III. Eerdmans, 2023. 291 pages. $26.99 (hardcover), ISBN 9780802878632.
Reviewed by Blaine Patrick Werner, Jr.
In Dancing in My Dreams: A Spiritual Biography of Tina Turner, Ralph H. Craig III tells the story of Tina Turner’s life as a tale of two dreams. The first is well known to the general public: achieving commercial success—as she put it, “[to] fill a football stadium” (p. 165). The second is to be a religious teacher, and it is this dream that Craig identifies as the main throughline of Turner’s life. Craig’s thesis is that “Turner’s story is fundamentally a religious one” (p. 6), and his stellar book takes care in crafting a compelling narrative of Turner’s life in terms of religion and spirituality. Published within Eerdmans’s Library of Religious Biography series, this book will be an exciting and insightful read for fans of Tina Turner because of Craig’s focus on Turner’s spirituality and religiosity in telling her story, which amounts to an intervention in previous accounts of Turner’s life that have not paid sufficient attention to this aspect of her life.