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'Positively 4th Street' by David Hajdu

REVIEWS:
Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña and Richard Fariña

"A lovely madeleine of a book…[an] offbeat, compelling [story of] two sisters, their Machiavellian lovers and the assorted egos, ambitions, flirtations, rivalries and moments of musical genius that made those days so indelible." — Janet Maslin, The New York Times

"This ambitious four-headed biographical narrative…vividly re-creates the folk era: the odd alliances, the music forged between idealists and misfits, the convergence of rebels of varying talent and temperament." — Terrance Rafferty, GQ

"Think of Positively 4th Street as A Little Night Music scored for dulcimer and motorcycle. Or a pas de quatre, with wind chimes, love beads, and a guest appearance by Thomas Pynchon. As David Hajdu…rotates among his principals until at last they settle down to play house in Carmel and Woodstock, he is such an ironist among blue notes, so knowledgeable about their performing selves on stage, in bed, and in our mezzotinted memories, that he seems almost to be whistling scherzos." — John Leonard, The New York Review of Books

"One of the best books about music in America." — Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post Book Review

"Mr. Hajdu has the art of staging his moments without subjecting them to the embalming gaze of hindsight, and the result is a tonic freshness, the sense of a spirit recovered... He has clearly talked to everyone. No less importantly, he is able to channel the energies of that era convincingly. His weave of cultural history and dish creates a most poignant sense of coalescence and dissolution, both on the personal level, as relationships change and fray, and the larger cultural level, where —how to put it? — a whole larger feeling about things, the essence of 60's folk, emerges, flourishes and fades." — Sven Birkerts, The New York Observer

"[In] a teeming stack of Dylan biographies and commentaries, [this is] the one new publication of distinction and clarity." — David Remnick, The New Yorker

"David Hajdu makes a motley bunch of folkies — both naïve and ambitious, unquestionably talented and frequently unlikable — as memorable as any great fictional characters." — Peter Terzian, Newsday

"From the sly Village title to the devastating New York characterizations, the probing, revelatory sentences, and the cruel plot, David Hajdu's Positively 4th Street recalls a lost Henry James novel transplanted to the 1960s." — Robert Polito, BookForum

"Hajdu adds an important chapter to the Dylan legend [and] deftly re-creates these era-defining characters and their world." — Gregory Curtis, Time

"Absorbing... Positively 4th Street offers a window into the folk music scene of the early '60s, into which Dylan, cloaked in enigmas of his own devising, insinuated himself." — A. O. Scott, Slate