Praise for Chronicles: Volume One by Bob Dylan:
„Flabbergasting… This book recaptures its author's first stirrings of creativity with amazing urgency.“
–The New York Times
„Another side of Bob Dylan emerges…in Chronicles: Volume One, a candid memoir that pulls the veil of mystique from pop culture's reluctant icon to reveal a creative giant unlocking his destiny.“
–USA Today
„Chronicles' stories are about real invention and inspiration, but they are also about demoralization, about how withdrawal or half-efforts or even failures can work their own saving grace. Dylan tells these stories unflinchingly, from an internal vantage that few, if any, ever expected from him. He uncovers these moments, measures and owns them, and then he moves on. It's a remarkable achievement, and like Henry Miller's best personal writings, it is a story that opens up the times that it portrays, and then reveals the possibilities of the human spirit. They aren't always easy possibilities. After all, it's life only, but it's never been written this way before.“
–Rolling Stone
„If you have ever wondered what goes on inside the mind of a genius, well, here it is, laid out in easy to read prose, by the man himself. Chronicles: Volume One…allows the reader access to Dylan's inner life, following his thoughts as they rattle around, experiencing his memories unfold, catching sparks of inspiration as they fly. Think of it as 'Being Bob Dylan.'
„Chronicles is…a book bursting with life…. Dylan reveals himself in his prose, filled with ideas, philosophies, enthusiasms, a warm appreciation of people and a rich sense of the absolute absurdity of life…. There is something on every page, in every paragraph, that demands attention. He has an acute sense of history… and a wonderful sense of place…. He writes beautifully about music, with insight, enthusiasm and flashes of poetry.
„In rock and roll terms, this book is like discovering the lost diaries of Shakespeare. It may be the most extraordinarily intimate autobiography by a 20th-century legend ever written.“
–The Daily Telegraph (London)
„Surprise, surprise: Chronicles: Volume One, a memoir tapped out over three years on a manual typewriter, turns out to be the work of a masterful essayist, a compelling cultural observer and, yes, a poet masquerading as trapeze artist. We knew Dylan could write; we simply didn't know that he could write so well, or that the professional curmudgeon could revisit his back pages with such warmth, compassion and insight….
„You hear Dylan's inimitable voice, his cadence, his dry wit, twists of phrase, the rasp, rush and tumble of memories — all beautifully articulated. Turns out Dylan has a Proustian penchant for remembering things past, conjuring what people looked like, what they wore, what they said.
„Better yet, Chronicles delivers what Dylan has so parsimoniously dispensed in selected interviews over the decades: genuine insights into his work…. Chronicles offers a way to understand the mind and art of its author at a crucial juncture, when Dylan is finding the voice that speaks to and (despite his protests) for a generation, when he's busily reinvigorating bardic tradition.“
–The Washington Post
„Chronicles: Volume One exceeds all expectations… it is as purposeful and full of power as any of his greatest songs or stage performances of the past 40-some years…. He is often funny… He is brilliantly specific… Best of all, he recaptures his feelings of humility and wonder at many of the musicians he was meeting and listening to, telling at one point of a 'skin-stinging' performance by Mike Seeger, of the New Lost City Ramblers.“
–The Toronto Star
„Chronicles… is vintage Dylan: occasionally puzzling, often quirky and enchanting on multiple levels, starting with his breathtaking skill at words…. The book is also drenched with song references and history that's loving, true and probably as close as we'll get to a window into Dylan's guarded soul.“
–New York Daily News
„The first volume of Bob Dylan's ornery autobiography is a fascinating, maddening time-travel ride… Chronicles affirms Dylan's idiosyncrasies and his mastery of the vernacular… With this book, Dylan finally has begun to write his own story. Chronicles is packed with ruminations on musical theory, sharp and humorous commentary, flashes of poetry — and facts filtered and colored to flummox, entertain, and illuminate.“
–The Boston Globe
„Informal and unadorned in tone, Chronicles is tersely focused, laconically witty and crammed with information…. It is graced by bursts of admirably apt description — he refers to an elegant woman's 'illegible smile' and summons up 'early singers who sang like they were navigating burning ships.' Its generally sprightly pace occasionally unwinds like an old pocket watch to accommodate slow, rambling scenes that make for some of the book's most compelling passages — and sometimes actually do hint at what it's like to be Bob Dylan.“
–Los Angeles Times Book Review
„It should come as no surprise to anyone that Dylan can write, and Chronicles is loaded with vivid prose…. One gets the sense from Dylan that his genius, when it came, just poured out, more inspiration than perspiration.“
–Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
„This memoir from the self-proclaimed heir to Woody Guthrie is fascinating…. Like a great song, in which each note and phrase add up to something provocative and entertaining, this memoir adds up. The conversational flow of the book and the countless nuggets of information a reader stumbles across, seemingly by chance, give the whole enterprise the feel of a jam-packed opus like Desolation Row.'“
–The New York Post
„Chronicles is a strikingly candid, endlessly fascinating tome…. Chockfull of surprising details and vivid recollections, Chronicles is a sheer gift to those Dylan obsessives eager to get at the truth about the great man…. The pace is leisurely, the tone idiosyncratically poetic.“
–Entertainment Weekly
„Every line of Chronicles…reverberates with the marrow-shaking snarl of the mesmerizing American voice that first signed up with Columbia records in New York City in 1961… Magical… Chronicles takes its place next to On the Road and Guthrie's Bound for Glory as an essential record of an American artist's manifest destiny.“
–The Observer
„It's a crazy, brilliant, maddening book that poses more questions than it answers. I could not put it down once I had picked it up. All of which to say, it's by, and about, Bob Dylan.“
–Cleveland Plain-Dealer
„After all those shrugs and grunts and elliptical responses and flat-out refusals to reveal anything more than what's contained on any of his 43 albums comes Chronicles: Volume One. It's a memoir, written by Dylan, and it's surprisingly — no make that shockingly — candid…. What's…immediately impressive is the quality of Dylan's prose… his character sketches blaze with insight and wit.“
–The Sunday Oregonian
„…stunningly clear writing. Dylan's prose voice is ranch-hand direct. Unlike his lyrics, which transform images into rhetorical devices that circle in the air and resonate on several levels, Dylan's businesslike sentences cut to the chase. Even when loaded with description, they're not flowery. They're building blocks of stories, closer to Elmore Leonard than to William Shakespeare, and their crisp cadences often propel the narrative, and Dylan's darting digressions, at a detective-story clip…. It's pretty amazing to glimpse the musical notions and animating ideas that, after all this time, keep Bob Dylan in motion.“
–The Philadelphia Inquirer
„This memoir from the self-proclaimed heir to Woody Guthrie is fascinating… Like a great song, in which each note and phrase add up to something provocative and entertaining, this memoir adds up.“
–The New York Post
„The most engaging parts Chronicles“>of Chronicles are those dealing with his youth, which bristle with vivid descriptions of bitter, wintry New York, so evocative that you shiver in sympathy as he pounds the night-time streets, drinking in the sights and sounds, storing up observations for future reference… Chronicles: Volume One is an unexpectedly easy and entertaining read…there's no denying the honesty of his account.“
–The Independent (London)
„Insightful… a more human look at the greatest songwriter of the era.“
–Rocky Mountain News
„Dylan's writing never loses its richness, its sense of crystalline observation. He's also unexpectedly frank about his own shortcomings — but not too frank. Throughout, a careful balance has been struck between elusiveness and revelation.“
–Sunday Telegraph (London)
„Dylan's His swiftly paced memoir makes for literature of a high order, recounting his life and times with humor and righteous fire.“
–Reuters
„Generous, incisive, and disarmingly sincere, Chronicles: Volume One is the tactile autobiography of an overwhelming sensibility…. Dylan's anecdotes are as pointed as the signpost arrow in 'Blind Willie McTell': streams of thoughtfulness converging on the omnivorous sound he is after, the landscape being excavated, the off-center types who'll eventually populate it, fresh mysteries rising out of poker-faced antiquities…. The book is full of passages where every affinity intersects for the reader, using casual-sounding words that ricochet through the room like chain lightning, a language that means to knock you sideways into Judgment Day but still leave a smile on your face.“
–The Village Voice
„A conventional narrative of Dylan's life would surely have revealed little that we do not know already; but convention has never been Dylan's way and what we have here is fragments of his career, from its ripest point at the beginning of the 1960s to a depressing nadir 25 years later, that expose him more brutally than any of the gnomic public pronouncements for which he has become notorious. The book's structure is elegant… Chronicles is tautly written, vividly cinematic, and funny…. deceptively rich and reflective.“
–Financial Times (London)
„A unique and wonderful book…. Dylan has gone back and written a portrait of the artist as a young man, foregrounding the evolution of his music. In doing so, he's gone back and reconstructed not what the rest of us have found fascinating about his career, but what he found fascinating…. Bob's written the book that nobody else could write… and that's what makes it inspiring.“
–New York Magazine
„Part one of a trilogy, this first volume will have you mesmerized by a truly great music legend… This book is one of the most important in its genre, painting a colourful picture of a phenomenal singer and songwriter.“
–The Sun (London)
„Chronicles: Volume One… is a delight. It's not quite an orthodox autobiography, looking back over a life from beginning to end, but it is lucid, engaging and incredibly direct. Dylan has taken back his own story from his biographers…. He has more real literature in him than a thousand professors.“
–The Evening Standard (London)
„Chronicles…is a fascinating, often humorous, surprisingly straightforward…tale by the bard from Hibbing.“
–Minneapolis Star Tribune
„An essential work, as throbbingly alive as Dylan's 'bible,' Jack Kerouac's On The Road…. Shivery metaphors appear again and again: midnight, murder, fire. Reading this book is like slipping into the skin of a poet, the poet of our time.“
–People
„Dylan's a wonderful, engaging writer. Though he says he never 'got Faulkner' in one of the long name-dropping sections where he cites the books that made an impression on a young sponge in New York City in the early 60s, he has a similar gift for evoking atmosphere and describing scenes with such poetic precision you'll begin to believe you were actually with him when he met Jack Dempsey in Dempsey's bar…. If his old pal Allen Ginsberg were alive, a man mentioned only by reference here, I'm betting he would review Chronicles: Volume One“>Chronicles: Volume One with great relish and admiration.“
–Detroit Free Press
„The first volume of legendary songwriter and musical chameleon Bob Dylan's autobiography is a corker. The nearly 300-page tome is full to the brim with sharply drawn observations…. There's wonders a-plenty recounted through this lively, exceptional memoir. From its crisp prose style — defined by short, punchy sentences — to its lucid remembrances, the book is an involving page-turner of the most gripping sort.“
–The Halifax Daily News (Canada)
„The narrator of Chronicles: Volume One turns out to be a superbly candid and engaging character, with a sharp descriptive eye… and a writing style pitched somewhere between Kurt Vonnegut at his most dryly aphoristic and a grown-up Holden Caulfield.“
–Independent on Sunday (London)
„In… passages of unarrested brilliance, he serves up the slew of experience and influence that brought a new, personal, poetic form to popular songs…. Overall, the book displays an unusual openness on Dylan's part.“
–The News & Observer (Raleigh, North Carolina)
„If you want a look into the prismatic heart of the young Bob Dylan, a very strange enchanted boy if there ever was one, then open to any page and get on the ride…. His prose is something like Jack Kerouac meets Raymond Chandler meets Yeats, a wrecked landscape of greatness, syncopated rhythm and heroic men on hard, lonely roads at dark.“
–Newsday
„Here comes Chronicles, an extremely good book indeed, actually a great one. If you are not weeping with gratitude by the end, then, frankly, the age has passed you by… I cannot remember a book that has made me happier than this one.“
–Sunday Times (London)
„A wholly engrossing and unaccountably touching memoir.“
–The Daily Telegraph
„What makes this book all but unique in its field, is that it is not so much the story of an artist's life as a meditation on the birth and development of an artistic vocation, and on what happens when that vocation is suddenly subjected to unimaginable pressures… It shouldn't be missed.“
–The Gazette (Montreal)
„Dylan touches on a fascinating variety of topics — personal, musical, historical…. With this rich, intermittently preposterous, often tender work, Bob Dylan has delivered more than many of us dared hope for.“
–The Guardian (London)
„If you want a magisterial portrait of the invention of a great artist, you will be mesmerized… Gorgeous, lyrical… This memoir, like Dylan's songs, is an indispensable map to the light and darkness of our age.“
–Irish Independent
„An excellent read…“
–Ottawa Citizen
„Bob Dylan, the greatest and most important Western writer since Shakespeare, hasn't really written the story of his life in this fascinating, captivating, intimate, accessible and widely acclaimed memoir. Instead, he's written mainly the story of his birth, the creative chrysalis when he transformed himself from Bobby Zimmerman to Bob Dylan 'a folk musician who gazed into the gray mist with tear-blinded eyes and made up songs that floated in a luminous haze'… It's remarkable how well the 63-year-old has captured the inner life of his younger self, both artistically and emotionally.“
–Capital Times (Madison, WI)
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