Although the book ends in a bit of a limbo—as any book that follows Dylan in his later career is destined to do—this lively...
The mysteries of Bob Dylan captured in even-handed, never-boring fashion.
Like another American dreamer, Jay Gatsby, Dylan is the product of his own myth. Unlike Gatsby, the myth—the multiple sides of which were recently displayed like museum pieces in Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There—has long been part of the package. Still, no matter how calculated the mystery may be, Dylan remains a chameleon even to those close to him. According to Rolling Stone founding editor and longtime rock chronicler Dalton (El Sid: Saint Vicious, 1997, etc.), Dylan “writes compelling tales about his character in a series of self-portraits that he then peevishly paints over.” In this latest attempt to lift the Dylan veil, Dalton offers less a straight biography than an inspired, imaginative investigation into Dylan’s many sides: dedicated folkie, gifted poet, egomaniac, wannabe maker of abstract cinema. The author sifts the songs for real-life clues and tackles certain aspects of the Dylan story that have long been a source of controversy. Examples: Dylan did visit Woody Guthrie, there was no benediction, no passing of the torch; the dying folkie may not have even known Dylan was there. Dylan wasn’t booed for going electric at the Newport Folk Festival; he was booed because he only played 15 minutes. The supposedly life-changing near-death 1966 motorcycle accident was likely no more than a minor scrape.
Although the book ends in a bit of a limbo—as any book that follows Dylan in his later career is destined to do—this lively and literate attempt to read a half-century's worth of brain scans from a literal living legend strikes the right balance between admiration and skepticism.Pub Date: April 24, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4013-2339-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2012
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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