Grown-Up Anger

I’m almost done with Daniel Wolff’s Grown-Up Anger. It’s about Bob Dylan – you know, your favorite band’s favorite singer-songwriter – and Woody Guthrie, the folk singer a young Dylan set out to emulate. The book is also about the tragic (and quite likely sinister) death of 73 people in the small mining town of Calumet, Michigan in 1913.

The chapters about Dylan are fascinating, as are the chapters about Guthrie. And the chapters about the lives of miners in the late 1800s and early 1900s constitute a heartbreaking education. But I’m not sure what to make just yet of Wolff’s claim that the Calumet tragedy is a secret key that unlocks the political anger in the music of Guthrie and Dylan.

Grown-Up Anger is a weird book that doesn’t all add up for me. But I will say this: I haven’t wanted to put it down.