Eric Clapton is the million-selling, Grammy Award-winning master of the blues guitar, whose fans summed up their admiration in a statement that appeared all over London's subway walls in 1965: "Eric Clapton is God.".

For Clapton, fame has been won at great cost. During the early 1970s, he saved himself from heroin addiction, only to confront alcoholism a decade later. In recent years, tragedy has consumed him in ways that have proven even more devastating. In 1988 his marriage to Pattie Boyd - who inspired his 1970 masterwork "Layla" - ended in divorce. In 1990 he lost four of his closest associates and friends, including fellow blues guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan, in a post-concert helicopter crash.

And in 1991 his four-year-old son, Conor, fell to his death from a window in Manhattan, inspiring his heartbreaking tribute and #1 hit, "Tears in Heaven." Complete with many rare or previously unpublished photographs, along with a comprehensive discography, Crossroads ranks as a full-scale, serious biography of a man who has transformed personal suffering and temporary defeats into lasting artistic victories.