The Monk's Record Player
Thomas Merton, Bob Dylan, and the Perilous Summer of 1966
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
The story of a monk, a minstrel, and the music that brought them together
In 1965 writer-activist-monk Thomas Merton fulfilled a twenty-four-year dream and went to live as a hermit beyond the walls of his Trappist monastery. Seven months later, after a secret romance with a woman half his age, he was in danger of losing it all. Yet on the very day that his abbot uncovered the affair, Merton found solace in an unlikely place—the songs of Bob Dylan, who, as fate would have it, was experiencing his own personal and creative crises during the summer of 1966.
In this striking parallel biography of two countercultural icons, Robert Hudson plumbs the depths of Dylan's surprising influence on Merton's life and writing, recounts each man's interactions with the woman who linked them together—Joan Baez—and shows how each transcended his immediate troubles and went on to new heights of spiritual and artistic genius. Readers will discover here a riveting story of creativity and crisis, burnout and redemption, in the tumultuous era of 1960s America.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hudson (The Christian Writer's Manual of Style) weaves a fun tale of cross-cultural influence in this exploration of Bob Dylan's influence on Thomas Merton which never convincingly demonstrates a relationship beyond artist and fan. Though a Trappist hermit, Merton was also a worldly monk who traveled outside the monastery walls at the Abbey of Gethsemani in central Kentucky to meet with such cultural and religious figures as Joan Baez, Jacques Maritain, and Thich Nhat Han, Hudson writes. Merton also listened to jazz and folk (especially Dylan) on the abbey's record player. Drawing on the well-known details of the lives of these two figures in what's billed as a parallel biography, Hudson sketches arcs for both men that eventually come together with their separate involvements in pacifist movements of the mid-'60s. Readers are left with Merton's journals about Dylan as the two men's only connection since the book's protagonists never actually met. While Dylan's music serves as a nice frame for Merton's activism chapters conclude with timelines tracking Merton's biography and Dylan's discography the book reveals little new about either man. Newcomers to Merton will find many endearing details here, but general readers will come away wishing for deeper insights into the ways Dylan's music might have informed Merton's religious thinking.
