"Open to artistic inspiration anywhere he found it," Wilentz writes near the end of the book,"Dylan was not so much a sponge (though he has always absorbed prodigious amounts) as an alchemist,taking common materials and creating new art. Nothing that came within his field of vision escaped him: 1930s French films, 1850s minstrel songs,the works of Shakespeare, Dolly Parton, Saint John of Patmos,Muddy Waters-anything of beauty, no matter how terrible,became something to seize on and make his own."
And that is the essence of this book: what Dylan seized upon and how he made it his, and our, own.
I highly recommend this book to any fan of Bob Dylan, student of American music, or, for that matter, student of America in the 20th and early 21st Century.
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