Because my expertise includes not only medicine but also Bob Dylan’s life and art, I have to stand on a soap box and crow about Bob winning the Nobel Prize in Literature this very day.
He’s the first musician to win the award. The literature prize is given for a lifetime of writing rather than for a single work.
The Swedish Academy credited Mr. Dylan with “having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.”
Sara Danius, a literary scholar and the permanent secretary of the 18-member Nobel academy, which awards the prize, called Mr. Dylan “a great poet in the English-speaking tradition” and compared him to Homer and Sappho, whose work was delivered orally.
Americans should be proud, songwriters should be inspired, and residents of Hibbing, Minnesota, my hometown and Bob Dylan’s, should be awed beyond belief. Their majestic high school in this small iron ore village produced a literary legend.
Hibbing High School Auditorium, where Bob (Dylan) Zimmerman performed while in high school
Bob (Dylan) Zimmerman’s boyhood home in Hibbing, Minnesota
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Introducing …, THE DOCTOR AND MR. DYLAN, Dr. Novak’s debut novel, a legal mystery. Publication date September 9, 2014 by Pegasus Books.
On October 2, 2014 THE DOCTOR AND MR. DYLAN became the world’s #1 bestselling anesthesia Kindle book on Amazon.com.
KIRKUS REVIEW
In this debut thriller, tragedies strike an anesthesiologist as he tries to start a new life with his son.
Dr. Nico Antone, an anesthesiologist at Stanford University, is married to Alexandra, a high-powered real estate agent obsessed with money. Their son, Johnny, an 11th-grader with immense potential, struggles to get the grades he’ll need to attend an Ivy League college. After a screaming match with Alexandra, Nico moves himself and Johnny from Palo Alto, California, to his frozen childhood home of Hibbing, Minnesota. The move should help Johnny improve his grades and thus seem more attractive to universities, but Nico loves the freedom from his wife, too. Hibbing also happens to be the hometown of music icon Bob Dylan. Joining the hospital staff, Nico runs afoul of a grouchy nurse anesthetist calling himself Bobby Dylan, who plays Dylan songs twice a week in a bar called Heaven’s Door. As Nico and Johnny settle in, their lives turn around; they even start dating the gorgeous mother/daughter pair of Lena and Echo Johnson. However, when Johnny accidentally impregnates Echo, the lives of the Hibbing transplants start to implode. In true page-turner fashion, first-time novelist Novak gets started by killing soulless Alexandra, which accelerates the downfall of his underdog protagonist now accused of murder. Dialogue is pitch-perfect, and the insults hurled between Nico and his wife are as hilarious as they are hurtful: “Are you my husband, Nico? Or my dependent?” The author’s medical expertise proves central to the plot, and there are a few grisly moments, as when “dark blood percolated” from a patient’s nostrils “like coffee grounds.” Bob Dylan details add quirkiness to what might otherwise be a chilly revenge tale; we’re told, for instance, that Dylan taught “every singer with a less-than-perfect voice…how to sneer and twist off syllables.” Courtroom scenes toward the end crackle with energy, though one scene involving a snowmobile ties up a certain plot thread too neatly. By the end, Nico has rolled with a great many punches.
Nuanced characterization and crafty details help this debut soar.
To reach the Amazon webpage to purchase The Doctor and Mr. Dylan, click on the book image below:
