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 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
SEEN & HEARD
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