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: today
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 football star’s bracing account of his battle for racial equality—and how powerful forces arrayed against him.
A principled athlete strives for social justice.
Kaepernick forthrightly details the activism that earned him global renown but cost him his NFL career. In 2016, the San Francisco 49ers quarterback “was filled with disgust” after police shootings of fellow Black men in several American cities. Before a preseason game, he made a spontaneous decision: “It hit me in that moment that I should find a seat” during the national anthem. He did the same at two more games before reporters noticed. Kaepernick will forever be associated with “taking a knee” during the anthem, but he credits Eric Reid—a teammate who agreed with Kaepernick’s message—for suggesting that they kneel together during subsequent anthems. The protest changed everything for Kaepernick. President Trump vilified him. Kaepernick and his wife received death threats. And though he’d taken the 49ers to a Super Bowl, no teams would sign him. He will likely make news for his take on Jay-Z, whose lucrative partnership with the NFL was criticized as an attempt to launder the league’s reputation. Visiting Africa, where Kaepernick learns about “African leaders who willingly sold their own people to the enslavers,” he “couldn’t help but to think about Jay-Z and the NFL.” In opening chapters, Kaepernick recalls suffering traumatic racial abuse as a child. Being in “white spaces”—he was adopted by white parents—placed him “under a microscope every minute of every day.” He isn’t always nuanced, depicting some people he disagrees with as cartoonishly clueless. But his writing about how college and pro teams “lied” to him about injuries underlines his “feeling of being a disposable commodity.” A decade has passed since Kaepernick played in the NFL, but he stays fit in case “a team needing a QB” calls.
A football star’s bracing account of his battle for racial equality—and how powerful forces arrayed against him.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2026
ISBN: 9781538777879
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Legacy Lit/Hachette
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 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
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