Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Like almost all the reviewers so far I loved this book, and like some I was also in the same neighborhood as the events recorded in this wonderful book. In every instance where I knew someone or hung out at a place mentioned, the version here coincides exactly with what I remember but there is so much more I didn't know and so many people I only knew about second hand. This is a generous and kind book but also a starkly honest one. If you want to know what it was like then in Greenwich village in the 60s, then this is the best source I know of. Bob Dylan's persona in various documentaries comes off to many as arrogant but you will gain a new appreciation for him both as an artist and as a person from one who was closer to him than any other in his first years as an artist (1961 to 1964), when most of the events in the book take place. You will also understand what attracted him to Suze Rotolo. My memory of her was of a radiant smile and personality, but you will understand clearly from this book, as did Bob Dylan, that there was solid substance behind her wonderful smile.
I also want to recommend this book to today's generation, those under the age of 25 or so. There is a new spirit of idealism and creativity and I think you would find it profitable to read an account of an earlier era that also was pregnant with that kind of promise that had yet to come to fruition. As Suze Rotolo makes clear, it was a time when the exploding creativity and freedom of the sixties was still living within the husk of an older and much darker world. The old ways affected everyone, even the most bohemian denizens of Greenwich Village. There is great wisdom here about the conflicts and struggles that come when a young woman instinctively knows that conventional ways are limiting and stunting her as a person but there is no vocabulary and not yet the support of the nascent women's movement to help her.
If you have any interest at all in Bob Dylan, in Greenwich Village in the sixties, in the folkmusic revival of that period, in the struggles of politically and socially conscious young women in the immediate pre-feminist period or if you just want to enjoy yourself or learn some lessons for the present from experiences of the past you owe it to yourself to read this terrific book.
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