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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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