A fine addition to the vast library surrounding America’s great troubadour.
Lavishly illustrated history of Bob Dylan’s musical apprenticeship and breakthrough.
In the beginning, there was the folkie Dylan, who arrived mysteriously on the Greenwich Village scene and single-handedly changed the world. That’s the received wisdom—sort of. Writing in this extended version of his liner notes to Dylan’s Bootleg Series early-years box, historian Wilentz argues that Dylan was very much part of a community of artists “that included detractors as well as mentors, rivals as well as allies.” Dylan has been notoriously hard to track over the years, thanks to his inventions and reinventions, but Wilentz, backed by plentiful documentary and archival material, pins down facts and dates. One comes on Christmas Eve of 1956 with a 15-year-old Dylan cutting his first record with two high school bandmates, his ragged but inspired performance making up in part for “the trio’s inability to stay on key, let alone find a steady groove.” Seeing Buddy Holly at his third-from-last performance before his fatal plane crash, a tragedy that “has stayed with him as a fateful, even prophetic event,” confirmed Dylan as a devoted rocker. But hearing Odetta made him trade in his electric guitar for an acoustic and pushed him to Greenwich Village in the full bloom of its second flowering, the streets full of artists and musicians, cheap restaurants, and welcoming cafes. Dylan found an early champion in Israel Goodman Young, whose Folklore Center doubled as a performance venue, and tutors in Woody Guthrie, Dave Van Ronk, and the Clancy Brothers. Wilentz also turns up an amusing tidbit in which Dylan plays harmonica on a Harry Belafonte record, doing 17 takes before getting it right, Belafonte always keeping his cool. With a few rough moments, these were Dylan’s salad years, when some of his most iconic songs were written and recorded, and Wilentz’s book, with photographs on nearly every page, is a worthy tribute.
A fine addition to the vast library surrounding America’s great troubadour.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2026
ISBN: 9781419791758
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.
In which the veteran humorist enters middle age with fine snark but some trepidation as well.
Mortality is weighing on Sedaris (Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, 2017, etc.), much of it his own, professional narcissist that he is. Watching an elderly man have a bowel accident on a plane, he dreaded the day when he would be the target of teenagers’ jokes “as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind.” A skin tumor troubled him, but so did the doctor who told him he couldn’t keep it once it was removed. “But it’s my tumor,” he insisted. “I made it.” (Eventually, he found a semitrained doctor to remove and give him the lipoma, which he proceeded to feed to a turtle.) The deaths of others are much on the author’s mind as well: He contemplates the suicide of his sister Tiffany, his alcoholic mother’s death, and his cantankerous father’s erratic behavior. His contemplation of his mother’s drinking—and his family’s denial of it—makes for some of the most poignant writing in the book: The sound of her putting ice in a rocks glass increasingly sounded “like a trigger being cocked.” Despite the gloom, however, frivolity still abides in the Sedaris clan. His summer home on the Carolina coast, which he dubbed the Sea Section, overspills with irreverent bantering between him and his siblings as his long-suffering partner, Hugh, looks on. Sedaris hasn’t lost his capacity for bemused observations of the people he encounters. For example, cashiers who say “have a blessed day” make him feel “like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.” But bad news has sharpened the author’s humor, and this book is defined by a persistent, engaging bafflement over how seriously or unseriously to take life when it’s increasingly filled with Trump and funerals.
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39238-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
PROFILES
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