Great White‘s Mark Kendall will publish his memoir “Soul Of A Man” through Diversion Books in autumn 2027.
Mark Kendall has a publisher. The Great White founder and guitarist has signed with Diversion Books for “Soul Of A Man: My Life In Great White, From The Stage And Beyond“, scheduled for autumn 2027. Jeffrey Mangus of Mangus Literary Group brokered the deal and has been working with Kendall on the manuscript.
“This isn’t just a story about rock ‘n’ roll,” Kendall said. “It’s the story of everything that happened when the music stopped – the mistakes, the miracles, the people I loved, lost, and the grace that allowed me to move on. I wanted to write the truth, not just the best moments. I’ve lived a life I could never have imagined, and finally, I’m ready to tell the whole story.”
The publisher’s account of it is similar: a book that moves past the Sunset Strip years into addiction, recovery, loss, faith and second chances.
Kendall has been open about the process for months. He was originally approached to write something about guitars, and turned it into something else.
“I’m trying not to make it a real dirt book, but some feelings might get hurt,” he said in January. He described Mangus as having drawn out material he had not expected to revisit, particularly from his childhood.
The title came from what the work felt like. “I was trying to think of a title for it, and I ended up calling it ‘Soul of a Man‘ because I’m pretty much burying my soul on this thing,” he said. “I’m going all the way back to childhood, telling every story you can imagine, you know, with the guitar in there.”
Several of the hardest chapters of Kendall‘s life are in it.
He has been sober for seventeen years, and the book deals with how he got there. It also covers his friendship with Jack Russell, Great White‘s original singer and his bandmate from the beginning, who died on 14 August 2024 at 63. Kendall has said the story of the night the two of them met is in there.
It will also address 20 February 2003, when pyrotechnics ignited soundproofing foam at The Station in West Warwick, Rhode Island during a Great White performance. One hundred people died, among them the band’s touring guitarist Ty Longley, and around 230 were injured. It remains one of the deadliest nightclub fires in American history.
And it covers the illness he is living with now. Kendall was diagnosed with stage four kidney cancer in 2025.
He has kept working throughout. The most recent update he gave, in June, was that the tumour had reduced from 13 centimetres to four, with no sign of the disease spreading, a result he set against the goal of no evidence of disease at all. He is being treated with the immunotherapy infusion Keytruda alongside a daily course of Lenvima, and had earlier had radiation to deal with cancer that had reached his ribs.
Kendall formed the band in Los Angeles in 1977 and built its sound around blues and late-sixties rock rather than the glam that surrounded them on the Strip. With Michael Lardie on keys and guitar he formed the band’s writing core, and Audie Desbrow joined on drums in 1985.
They have sold more than ten million albums, taken six songs into the Billboard top 100 and nine albums into the top 200, with two multi-platinum records and five gold. Their cover of Ian Hunter‘s “Once Bitten, Twice Shy” brought a Grammy nomination for Best Hard Rock Performance in 1990.
