Despite occasionally graceful writing and input from hitherto untapped expert witnesses, this is not top-shelf Dylanology.
Four concerts viewed over more than four decades frame a new study of the musician.
Historian and poet Epstein (Lincoln’s Men: The President and His Private Secretaries, 2009, etc.) employs a quartet of Dylan gigs he attended—a 1963 solo acoustic date, a 1974 show with The Band, and 1997 and 2009 stops on the so-called Never Ending Tour—as pivots in his overview of the singer-songwriter’s 50-year musical journey. The results are a mixed bag. The ’63 performance in Washington, D.C., coincided with Dylan’s rise to folk-music stardom, and the ’74 Madison Square Garden stand was part of a trek that returned him to the stage after an eight-year layoff, but Epstein never integrates his observations into the flow of his biographical narrative. The latter two shows were merely stops on a long road, and the author parses them indifferently. Epstein is at his best dealing with his subject’s Minnesota boyhood, embrace of folk music and meteoric early-’60s ascent; fresh recollections from Nora Guthrie, daughter of Dylan’s role model Woody Guthrie, highlight the early going. Likewise, later chapters on the making of the important albums Time Out of Mind (1997) and Love and Theft (2001) benefit from revealing interviews with session men like drummer David Kemper and the late keyboardist-raconteur Jim Dickinson. Yet Epstein fails to penetrate the artist’s multitudinous masks at other crucial junctures. He offers nothing new about Dylan’s mid-’60s rock stardom, and his crucial relationship with first wife Sara Lownds is as mysterious here as it is in other accounts. The author has no patience with Dylan’s conversion to Christianity in the late ’70s, and the music that followed receives little consideration. Epstein takes in Dylan’s creatively manic later years as a touring and recording artist, writer, painter and radio host with an obsessive’s eye, but all the detail feels unsorted and second-hand.
Despite occasionally graceful writing and input from hitherto untapped expert witnesses, this is not top-shelf Dylanology.Pub Date: May 3, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-06-180732-9
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2011
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
