Book Review ‘The Dylan in All of Us’

http://www.truthdig.com/arts_culture/item/the_dylan_in_all_of_us_20100909/

Given the seriousness and pretension with which so many rock critics write about their favorite artists, you might expect an academician to bury Dylan beneath mounds of stentorian prose. But Wilentz is no ordinary academic. For one thing, along with Greil Marcus, he edited “The Rose and the Briar: Death, Love, and Liberty in the American Ballad.” For another, he was practically born into the subject. His father, Elias, ran the legendary Eighth Bookshop in Greenwich Village, a store, he says, “that helped nurture the Beat poets of the 1950s and the folk revivalists of the early 1960s.” (Elias also edited “The Beat Scene,” one of the earliest anthologies of Beat poetry.)