A dense compendium of significant feature interviews with Bob Dylan.
Rolling Stone contributing editor Cott (There's a Mystery There: The Primal Vision of Maurice Sendak, 2017, etc.), who contributes two interviews, discusses Dylan’s intimidating nature as a subject given his reputation for fungible autobiography: “His life story changed as he proceeded onward in his journey….You would also never know what his voice was going to sound like.” These 34 interviews illustrate how Dylan’s role in society changed over time, following his days as a precocious folk singer (the earliest interview dates from 1962). Some well-known interlocutors appear, ranging from Studs Terkel and Nat Hentoff to Sam Shepard and Jonathan Lethem, who characterizes Dylan in 2006 as “not impatient, but keenly alive to the moment, and ready on a dime to make me laugh and to laugh himself.” Despite Dylan’s reputation for “dislik[ing] interviews for years because he’s always asked to reveal something about his personal life or to interpret his lyrics,” he generally comes across as cheerful and generous, if mischievously opaque. The earlier interviews show him grappling with fame and influence against the chaotic backdrop of the 1960s. Regarding his departure from political songwriting, he observed in 1965, “you can make all sorts of protest songs and put them on a Folkways record. But who hears them?” In the 1970s, interviewers tracked his strange side projects, such as the four-hour film Renaldo and Clara, which coincided with his painful divorce, and his controversial excursions into born-again Christianity. By the 1980s, interviews showcased Dylan as a resurgent elder statesman of rock, a recurring motif throughout the last interview here, Douglas Brinkley’s long 2009 feature in Rolling Stone, in which Brinkley writes, “everyone feels energized by his charismatic presence.” The overall effect is an immersion in a singular figure’s life, though a fuller chronology of Dylan’s recordings and accomplishments might have provided accessibility for neophytes.
An engaging archive of Dylan’s own perspective on his artistic process and ever changing cultural significance.Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-7319-6
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
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