by Ian Bell ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 15, 2013
A middling book. Greil Marcus is better on Dylan’s place in the context of the “old, weird America,” though Bell ventures...
A British journalist peers across the Atlantic to suss out what Bob Dylan has been up to over the last half-century.
Former Observer editor and current Herald columnist Bell (Dreams of Exile: Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography, 1993) opens with an incident that has been well-reported to the point of near-tedium: that inglorious moment in Manchester, England, in which a spectator yelled “Judas,” only to have Dylan instruct the band, “Play it fucking loud.” The year was 1966. Soon, Dylan would be different, but for that moment, he was tousle-haired, defiant and snotty: “Jean-Jacques Rousseau on a good day could not have contrived this savage boy,” Bell smartly remarks. Packing his narrative with similarly learned cultural references, and sometimes sounding like an Oxford don speaking about the Beatles’ Aeolian cadences, Bell ponders the deliberateness with which Dylan built up his vast body of work, from improbable beginnings to his latter-day minstrelsy. Bell often assumes a portentous, arch tone, as if he’s caught Dylan red-handed in an act of flimflam: “Maybe Bobby Zimmerman just decided, back in 1958 or 1959, that you don’t get to be a star if you’re Bobby Zimmerman, from little Hibbing—where the hell?—in Minnesota.” Perhaps, but maybe someone who’s started in the music business as a teenager is allowed to reinvent himself, just as every other American is and maybe every other Briton, too. Alternately, Bell sometimes takes Dylan a little too seriously, a not-uncommon phenomenon in the vast literature surrounding him. Yet, he often hits just the right note, as when he divines that by merely seeking a little privacy after Blonde on Blonde, Dylan was adding to his legend: “Simply by stepping back from the microphone, Dylan had become ‘a recluse.’ ”
A middling book. Greil Marcus is better on Dylan’s place in the context of the “old, weird America,” though Bell ventures some useful observations from afar.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-60598-481-0
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Aug. 14, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2013
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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