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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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