Ballad of a Song and Dance Man

Ron Rosenbaum is one of America’s finest nonfiction authors. His bestselling book Explaining Hitler—an exploration of how and why Hitler became a monster, which I read when it was published in 1999—established its author as a master of cultural history. This time, Rosenbaum has turned his attention to Bob Dylan, a contemporary figure who might be the most influential and important songwriter in American history. He is, to date, the only one to be honoured with the Pulitzer Prize for literature. Rosenbaum has subtitled his book “A Kind of Biography.” This, he explains, “is less a formal biography than a biography of [Dylan’s] impact on the consciousness of the culture.”