Items related to Once Upon a Time: The Lives of Bob Dylan
Synopsis
Written with an intelligence and verve rarely found in rock biography, the mysterious artist that is Bob Dylan is illuminated through the cultural history of his time.
Half a century ago, a youth appeared from the American hinterland and began a cultural revolution. The world is still coming to terms with what Bob Dylan accomplished in his artistic explosion upon popular culture.
In Once Upon a Time, award-winning author Ian Bell draws together the tangled strands of the many lives of Bob Dylan in all their contradictory brilliance. For the first time, the laureate of modern America is set in his entire context: musical, historical, literary, political, and personal.
Full of new insights into the legendary singer, his songs, his life, and his era, the artist who invented himself in order to reinvent America is discovered anew. Once Upon a Time is a lively investigation of a mysterious personality that has splintered and reformed, time after time, in a country forever trying to understand itself. Now that mystery is explained.
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About the Author
Ian Bell is a past holder of the George Orwell Prize for Political Journalism and the award-winning author of Dreams of Exile, a biography of Robert Louis Stevenson. He is a columnist with the Herald and the Sunday Herald in Edinburgh.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* A public figure for decades, Bob Dylan remains enigmatic in spite of a recent spate of biographies. Bell, author of a biography of Robert Louis Stevenson, Dreams of Exile (1993), now offers less a full-fledged biography than an often insightful attempt to understand, as the title indicates, the many lives of this singular and frustratingly mysterious figure. From his upbringing within a tiny Jewish community in northern, gentile Minnesota (“He knew all about being a Jew in small-town Middle America, yet refused to accept that it mattered”) to his early days in Greenwich Village as a fabulist folksinger who made the rounds of numerous coffeehouses and, through a combination of mimicry, theft, and imitation, transformed himself from Bobby Zimmerman to Bob Dylan. Thus, it is a partial biography in terms of covering the arc of Dylan’s long career; Bell ends with Dylan’s masterful Blood on the Tracks in 1975, followed by a nod to his artistic resurrection in the 1990s and up to the present day. Rather, this is best described as a fully formed emotional biography, a fascinating read about an artist who, to this day, defends his right of “artistic autonomy,” refusing to be anyone but himself, whoever that may be. --June Sawyers
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- PublisherMainstream
- Publication date2012
- ISBN 10 1780575734
- ISBN 13 9781780575735
- BindingHardcover
- LanguageEnglish
- Number of pages592
- Rating
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