The Monk's Record Player

January 8, 2018
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.

February 15, 2018

Trappist monk Thomas Merton (1915-68) and folk-rock icon Bob Dylan (b. 1941) are unlikely to be referenced in the same breath, but Hudson (Four Birds of Noah's Ark) pursues this hitherto unexplored pairing in a fascinating study focusing chiefly on Merton's spiritual and authorial development, highlighting Dylan's influence on his literary endeavors. Although the two never met, Merton listened to Dylan's recordings and encountered Joan Baez and other Dylan compatriots. Hudson's access to archival materials and interviews shed light on Merton's conflicting desires for both solitude and female companionship. Using "Dylan interludes," the author also shows how the musician's successes and tribulations during the same time periods tie the two men together. Yearly chronologies, copious footnotes, and an exhaustive bibliography reflect Hudson's scholarship. VERDICT While Nobel Prize winner Dylan has always maintained a distinct celebrity, Merton's renown has dimmed somewhat, and it's nice to see this crusader for world peace introduced to a new generation of readers in such an intriguing way.--Barry Zaslow, Miami Univ. Libs., Oxford, OH

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 1, 2018
Writer, mystic, and Trappist monk Thomas Merton (1915-68) discovered Bob Dylan in 1965. That was the year that he began to live separately from his fellows in the new hermitage building on the grounds of his Gethsemani, Kentucky, monastery and that Dylan controversially came out as a rocker by opening his Newport Folk Festival set accompanied by electric blues players. Since 1958, Merton had refocused from personal spiritual development to human rights and international peace, and he found appropriate inspiration in The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll and The Times They Are a-Changin'. Dylan's newer, rock-accompanied, surrealist songs Maggie's Farm, Positively Fourth Street, and others cut even deeper, affecting in particular Merton's new poetry. Hudson presents Dylan's influence on Merton during a momentous period, 1965-68, that also included, for Merton, a clandestine (and physically chaste) love affair; for Dylan, a sidelining motorcycle accident and a huge burst of creativity. There are many books about Merton already, but Hudson, merging his fascinations with Merton and Dylan, writes so limpidly that shelf room just must be made for this one.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)