In this fatiguing chronicle of a gifted musician’s work, quality never equals quantity.
The renowned critic compiles more than four decades of writing about his favorite subject, who he has covered in such books as Invisible Republic (1997) and Like a Rolling Stone (2005).
The collection begins promisingly with Marcus’s most notorious single piece about Dylan, the caustic Rolling Stone critique of the two-LP set Self Portrait (1970). But this selection of album, concert and book reviews, features, liner notes, columns and academic papers is swiftly sabotaged by the author’s humorlessness, myopia and simple bad judgment. As ever, the writer relies on torturously scholastic readings of lyrics, odd and sometimes irrelevant sources and analogs and precious little musical explication to pick apart his thorny and highly inconsistent subject’s work. It doesn’t help that this book surveys nearly 30 years (1970–1997) of generally substandard writing and performing by Dylan. All too often, Marcus falls back on familiar tropes. He regularly flogs 1920s icons like Rabbit Brown, Dock Boggs and the other denizens of Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music to make his points, and he hashes over Dylan’s 1965–66 collaborations with The Band—first essayed in Mystery Train (1975)—once too often. The author’s pieces about Dylan’s inspired latter-day work is muddled and uncomprehending. He perplexingly writes off the renascent album Oh Mercy (1989) as a “producer’s album,” yet lauds Time Out of Mind (1997), also helmed by producer Daniel Lanois. At times, his contorted attempts to make an unusual connection are simply wrong-headed. His fantastical 2000 piece relating “Desolation Row” to an 1888 canvas by artist James Ensor is as insupportable as it is egregious. In one review, Marcus assails some writing in Dylan’s memoir Chronicles Volume 1 (2004), saying, “That line calls attention to itself.” The same could be said for almost the entire corpus of the author’s work about Dylan.
In this fatiguing chronicle of a gifted musician’s work, quality never equals quantity.Pub Date: Oct. 26, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-58648-831-4
Page Count: 496
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 27, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2010
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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