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
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
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