PanThe New RepublicFor all the messiness of his music, this account of Moore’s life is conspicuously tidy, assiduously painting Moore as a thoughtful, humble, and fundamentally shy person ... The more he goes on in this vein, the harder it is to square the Thurston Moore of the book with the Thurston Moore who played in the singular band that was Sonic Youth ... Sonic Life is basically a by-the-numbers rock star bio.
Michael Pollan
MixedThe New RepublicPollan is a mindful and enthusiastic psychonaut. He is also a gifted writer, who synthesizes unruly social histories and wreathes them around his own drug-taking experiences. And he articulates these experiences with great insight and eloquence, and without the usual clack that typifies so-called \'trip reports.\' But Michael Pollan has never explicitly cast himself in his writing as a pro-legalization advocate or anything like it. Late in How to Change Your Mind, he expresses his hope that the psychedelic experience will be more widely embraced, even outside of strictly \'therapeutic\' contexts. But then he pulls his punch. \'Does that mean I think these drugs should simply be legalized? Not quite.\' Instead, he maintains that one-on-one sessions with an experienced guide (whether a lab-coated clinician or an underground urban shaman) may be the ideal ... Pollan recognizes that the war on drugs is \'in truth a war on some drugs, their enemy status the result of historical accident, cultural prejudice, and institutional imperative.\' Yet there’s still the nagging sense that he’s benefiting from these hypocrisies: that he enjoys a freedom of self-tinkering and contemplation that is not universally applied. Culture shifts that encourage the curious to engage in recreational consciousness-fiddling are all well and good. They’re great. But they’re just another privilege, if unaccompanied by harm-reduction programs, reparations, a robust social safety net, and other progressive political measures that might define the drug war’s antebellum period ... Pollan may be following from the lessons of psychedelia, in which obvious truths can be plainly revealed to the user (or, here, the reader) in ways that are revelatory but not prescriptive or didactic. Still, at the risk of rehashing psychedelic ’60s platitudes of smiling on your brother and finding our way back to the garden, I can’t help but feel that one must orient an opened mind toward action. We may only ever meet nature halfway. But surely we should strive to embrace our fellow drug users on an equal footing.
Clinton Heylin
MixedThe New RepublicMore than a conventional, or conventionally readable, biography, A Restless, Hungry Feeling feels more like a hefty appendix to extant Dylan bios, or an advanced research seminar in Dylanology ... Heylin, like anyone who cares even a little bit about Bob Dylan, takes for granted that his subject is a master fabulist, if not a compulsive liar ... Rifling through old letters and contracts for clues to the \'real\' Dylan can feel a little beside the point, like fact-checking The Iliad against archaeological excavations from ancient Greece. Does Heylin expect to find some smoking gun, a scrawl in an old journal reading, \'I am going to make a point of performing my identity, to vex and frustrate the public, and particular critics and biographers?\' Such a po-faced confessional seems unlikely, and Heylin knows it. Even the titular \'double life\' conceit of these new biographies seems insufficient for an artist who recently boasted of containing multitudes ... Heylin’s book betrays the frustration of this knowledge. It’s riven with the sort of nastiness that marks first-rate obsessives, whose interest in a subject calcifies in time into a thinly veiled hatred, as the object of their affection fails to reveal its fullness ... The feeling that Heylin is spoiling his subject is compounded by the author’s writing, which has its own curdling effect. It’s not long before Heylin’s parenthetical corrections of quotes and typos, and his excessive deployment of \'[sic]\' seem like little more than rank pedantry ... A pervading sense of mean-spiritedness is never far from these pages. That tone is most obvious in the author’s chary regard of his icon ... Still, Heylin’s claim to be king of Dylanologists may well be apt. If nothing else, A Restless, Hungry Feeling serves as the literary equivalent of being stuck at the bar next to a Dylan Guy: the sort of superfan who bores with tedious trivia and is all too eager to correct any half-formed opinion offered by the more casual listener ... can’t help but slog across land well trodden.
