A valuable contribution to the record of Dylan’s legacy.
A portrait of the artist through his interviews.
The Dylan contained in this anthology is the ideal interview subject: insightful, playful, at times self-reflective, and rarely boring. This will come as no surprise to those who have followed Dylan closely or read the interviews previously collected in Jonathan Cott’s Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews (2017). What may come as a surprise is how fresh this volume reads. Burger—who has contributed to the publisher’s Musicians in Their Own Words series with portraits of John Lennon, Bruce Springsteen, and Leonard Cohen—mostly fills in around Cott’s book (the two overlap in only a handful of cases). The author draws smartly from the scores of Dylan interviews to present the full arc of his subject’s career from before his debut album to his 2016 Nobel Prize speech. With his notes and insightful introductions, Burger provides the necessary connective tissue and creates the narrative’s ultimate effect as an autobiographical oral history told in close to real time. It works, then, as an introductory text covering the iconic moments of an iconic life but also as something more intimate. Reading Dylan—even his absurdist performance-art press conferences of the mid-1960s—readers may feel more receptive to his ideas than when watching footage of the same scene. At the heart of Dylan’s artistry is his abiding love for music. In 2015, he told Robert Love about lying in bed as a boy in Hibbing, Minnesota, and listening to the Staple Singers on the radio: “It was the most mysterious thing I’d ever heard….And that singer is pulling things out of my soul that I never knew were there.” It is the same thing Dylan’s own music has done for so many of his listeners, which is what makes Burger’s arrangement rewarding.
A valuable contribution to the record of Dylan’s legacy.Pub Date: May 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-912777-42-9
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
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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