PanThe Los Angeles TimesThe Philosophy of Modern Song is a mouthful, a phrase that puts on airs. It asserts that the book is an important work, a tome that merits a place on your loftiest library shelf, up in the thin air where you keep the leather-bound, gilt-edged stuff ... But the title is also a wisecrack, too puffed up and self-important to be taken at face value ... As a work of prose, The Philosophy of Modern Song is relentless. It rip-snorts along, charging from song to song, idea to idea. Dylan can write what journalists call a great lede: a first sentence that detonates like a hand grenade ... What does all this add up to? Not quite a philosophy of modern song, or at least not a coherent one. But coherence isn’t what you want from Bob Dylan ... You have to plow through 46 chapters before encountering a song by a female artist ... Yet women loom large in his consciousness and are omnipresent in his pages — appearing in such monstrous form, evoked in language so marinated in misogyny, that, reading The Philosophy of Modern Song, I began to feel like a therapist, sneaking glances at my watch while the crackpot on the couch blurts one creepy fantasy after another ... It’s a bummer, to put it mildly, to find a Nobel laureate...mixing metaphors and spouting nonsense like an elderly uncle who bulk-emails links to Fox News segments.
Tom Zoellner
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewThe National Road is a chronicle of Zoellner’s wanderings and wanderlust, what he calls his \'unspecified hunger\' to cover the lower 48 states with \'a coat of invisible paint.\' It’s also a sneakily ambitious book whose 13 \'dispatches\' present a sweeping view of the American land and its inhabitants — how each has shaped, and deformed, the other ... Zoellner surveys other manifestations of malaise: the decline of the traditional porn movie industry in \'the other Hollywood,\' L.A.’s San Fernando Valley; a St. Louis suburb plagued by racism, redlining and corruption; the Nevada desert, where generations of fortune hunters have sought treasure above and below ground, in casinos and in gold mines, which, when they are stripped bare, leave behind ghost towns marked by toxic piles of tailings. The National Road is by no means an issue book, but it says more about predatory late-capitalism than many works that attack the topic head-on ... Zoellner is a beautiful writer. He’s also a busy one, prone to occasional flights of poetastery ... But these distracting moments of writerly writing are few. Zoellner is a superb reporter and a deep thinker, with a command of the centuries-long back story. He understands how history has been altered by Americans’ quirky religious yearnings and eschatological obsessions. He has his own premonitions of end times.
