Alternately funny, intriguing and shocking.
Perhaps the only thing more inscrutable than Bob Dylan is the cavalcade of misfits and muckrakers that parade through this earnest exploration of the artist’s even more curious brand of devotees.
Bob Zimmerman (b. 1941) started out his career as a rabid fan. So enamored was he of his boyhood idol Woody Guthrie that he tracked down the collapsing star all the way to his hospital bed, plying him for answers that the sick man could not possibly provide. Strange then, that so much of Dylan’s remarkable career has been saddled with the same kind of futilely obsessive adulation. Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Kinney (The Big One: An Island, an Obsession, and the Furious Pursuit of a Great Fish, 2009) mixes a lighthearted approach with the serious business of trying to figure out just what makes Dylan’s legions of followers tick. All of the most outrageous characters are here: the searchers, the collectors, the tapers, the pilgrims and the many who are pissed off at the artist. Of the whole bunch, however, those who came to believe that Dylan had somehow double-crossed them over the years are the most confounding. Either owing to his evolution as an artist or as a person, the depth of betrayal that he has inadvertently incited in these people—sometimes by going electric, at other times going to church—is truly fascinating. Of course, the expert analysis of some of Dylan’s most manic disciples can actually be yet another way of further scrutinizing one of the most already scrutinized figures in American music. Can even more be said about an avowed cypher by looking at the rather uncanny relationship with his fans? In this enjoyable book, longtime followers may be surprised to find out the answer is yes.
Alternately funny, intriguing and shocking.Pub Date: May 13, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4516-2692-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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