Alternately funny, intriguing and shocking.
Perhaps the only thing more inscrutable than Bob Dylan is the cavalcade of misfits and muckrakers that parade through this earnest exploration of the artist’s even more curious brand of devotees.
Bob Zimmerman (b. 1941) started out his career as a rabid fan. So enamored was he of his boyhood idol Woody Guthrie that he tracked down the collapsing star all the way to his hospital bed, plying him for answers that the sick man could not possibly provide. Strange then, that so much of Dylan’s remarkable career has been saddled with the same kind of futilely obsessive adulation. Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Kinney (The Big One: An Island, an Obsession, and the Furious Pursuit of a Great Fish, 2009) mixes a lighthearted approach with the serious business of trying to figure out just what makes Dylan’s legions of followers tick. All of the most outrageous characters are here: the searchers, the collectors, the tapers, the pilgrims and the many who are pissed off at the artist. Of the whole bunch, however, those who came to believe that Dylan had somehow double-crossed them over the years are the most confounding. Either owing to his evolution as an artist or as a person, the depth of betrayal that he has inadvertently incited in these people—sometimes by going electric, at other times going to church—is truly fascinating. Of course, the expert analysis of some of Dylan’s most manic disciples can actually be yet another way of further scrutinizing one of the most already scrutinized figures in American music. Can even more be said about an avowed cypher by looking at the rather uncanny relationship with his fans? In this enjoyable book, longtime followers may be surprised to find out the answer is yes.
Alternately funny, intriguing and shocking.Pub Date: May 13, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4516-2692-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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
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