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The Double Life of Bob Dylan: A Restless, Hungry Feeling, 1941-1966
Bottom of the pile
20
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
24/100Critics
16/100Scholars
Author:
Clinton Heylin
Publisher:
Little, Brown and Company
Date:
May 18, 2021
A new biography of one of contemporary culture's most iconic and mysterious figures by a certified Dylan-oligist.
What The Reviewers Say
... makes phenomenally captivating reading for any Dylan devotée, revealing unseen dimensions of the mercurial Nobel laureate, and much to surprise and delight even careful readers of Heylin’s earlier work.
If anyone is entitled to write this exhaustive biography, it’s the man who was described by Rolling Stone in 2016 as 'perhaps the world’s authority on all things Dylan.' And if he is as jaw-droppingly good at his job as his subject is at music, Heylin can also be just as prickly. He takes delicious pleasure in throwing darts at Dylan’s other chroniclers, calling one a 'minor writer,' another a 'largely unloved scribe'.
Peppered with fact-checking footnotes to point out where others have got it wrong (or where Dylan has lied), the book really comes alive at the beginning and the end, when Heylin goes beyond the endless details to capture his subject’s situation with sympathy.
More than a conventional, or conventionally readable, biography, A Restless, Hungry Feeling feels more like a hefty appendix to extant Dylan bios, or an advanced research seminar in Dylanology.
