Another footnote to the overflow of Dylan biography.
A look at Bob Dylan from an insider’s perspective promises more than it delivers.
On and off, from the early 1960s to the turn of the century, Victor Maymudes was one of those closest to Dylan for the longest stretches, to the point where the reclusive artist said, “Victor speaks for me!” He sometimes had the title of road manager, but at other times headed security, served as frequent chess partner, secured and designed his personal touring bus, engaged in philosophical, mind-bending conversations, and occasionally allowed himself to suffer humiliation as flunky or worse. “What I needed from Bob, I was more than willing to pay the price for, to have front-row access to his brilliance,” he said on the tapes that form the basis for this posthumous memoir, edited and co-written by his son. The author and Dylan clearly had a complex relationship—though so has anyone who has had any relationship with Dylan. A revelatory book might have resulted from it, but this isn’t it. The major skeleton in the closet turns out to be Victor’s, and there is more about buses and dogs than there is anything new about what makes Dylan tick. At one point, Victor apparently had the idea of “writing a book starring Bob’s personal bus,” perhaps even “narrated from the perspective of Bob’s tour bus,” which would not have been a good idea. Among the interesting bits: Dylan has very bad eyesight but doesn’t wear glasses because his whole world is interior. He hasn’t been involved with many women and prefers them passive. He quit drinking, cold turkey, in 1994. Victor felt deeply conflicted about writing any Dylan book, even after their rift made the lucrative proposition more of a necessity. He died in the process, leaving tapes behind, with the juicier stuff apparently left out.
Another footnote to the overflow of Dylan biography.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-1250055309
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2014
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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