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HARD RAIN

A DYLAN COMMENTARY

Riley, author of the best study by far of the Beatles' song catalogue (Tell Me Why, 1988), turns now to Bob Dylan—``the most important American rock 'n' roller since Presley''—with impressive, but less consistently persuasive, results. As before, Riley steers clear of biography and simply goes chronologically, album-by-album, song-by-song, through the Dylan oeuvre—including unreleased tracks, bootleg recordings, live concert tapes, and concert films. In fact, unlike most Dylan critics, Riley declines to link the songs to the life, contending (not always convincingly) that Dylan turns his ``intimate trials'' into ``public metaphors''—in contrast to ``self-serving,'' Me- decade types like James Taylor. Throughout, Riley stresses Dylan's humor, the satire implicit in his ``bad'' singing, his manipulations of his persona, and his eclectic roots. There's sharp criticism as well as enthusiasm here: The Times They Are A-Changin' succumbs to ``folkie social preening and black-and-white moralism''; Blonde on Blonde is a ``tour de force of obscurantist rock poetics''; ``I Shall Be Released'' is an ``overpraised and overplayed potboiler.'' Riley applauds Dylan's return to ``roots'' in his work with The Band and his country-ish albums but is pretty much appalled by the ``stringent and pious'' born-again albums. And, in contrast to many hard-core Dylan-ites, Riley finds little evidence of a revitalized Dylan once his ``slide'' begins circa 1978. Not everyone will buy Riley's attempt to view Dylan's weaknesses—the clichÇs, the slurred diction, etc.—as ``postmodernist.'' His dense, imagistic evocations of the songs occasionally become precious or strained. (`` `Idiot Wind' is an emotional soapbox as fearsome and cutting as any of the cutlery that flies in Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?'') But, with full attention given to Dylan as performer and writer, to cover versions and disciples (Springsteen, Neil Young), and even to other Dylan-commentators, this is an essential book for Dylanologists: comprehensive, knowing, challenging.

Pub Date: Aug. 3, 1992

ISBN: 0-394-57889-9

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1992

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

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INTO THE WILD

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)

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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