Impressively researched, this deep look at Dylan’s early career and initial stardom is a decidedly uneven but enjoyable ride.
Bob Dylan (b. 1941) has spent decades augmenting his singular talent by mythologizing, misdirecting, and outright lying about his life. This ambitious biography seeks the truth.
Noted music historian and critic Heylin has already written 10 books about Dylan, including the well-regarded biography Bob Dylan Behind the Shades (1991), as well as portraits of the Velvet Underground, Sex Pistols, Springsteen, and other rock luminaries. Here, the author is armed with material from Dylan’s papers and outtake footage from tour documentaries now housed at the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa. Even with those documents, not to mention Dylan’s own autobiography, Chronicles, and hundreds of interviews and press conferences over the years, the story of how Bobby Zimmerman from Minnesota became one of music’s most influential and enduring artists remains murky. To his credit, Heylin leans into the confusion, documenting who said what and how they would know even though it makes some parts, especially the chapters on Dylan’s early years, hard to follow. We still don’t even get a straight story on the origin of the name change. “Even in 1960,” writes the author, “he delighted in spinning yarns, telling close friend Dave Whitaker that it ‘was his mother’s name, and that he had taken it because…he didn’t want to be known by his father’s name.' " The last part of that statement, at least, was true. But since his Jewish mother’s family had come from Russia, it must have seemed to the worldly Whitaker rather unlikely that her family name was Welsh for ‘son of the sea.’ ” Heylin is on stronger footing in his discussions with eyewitnesses and analysis of documentary footage and studio recordings from sessions for such classics as “Like a Rolling Stone” or “Visions of Johanna.” In these passages, the narrative becomes an enlightening, informative delight.
Impressively researched, this deep look at Dylan’s early career and initial stardom is a decidedly uneven but enjoyable ride.Pub Date: May 18, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-316-53521-2
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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