The Monk's Record Player: Thomas Merton, Bob Dylan, and the Perilous Summer of 1966
Ebook
Overview
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.
A warm and vivid picture of two very different but unexpectedly related countercultural icons in that extraordinary mid-sixties moment of hope and imaginative enlargement. This book enables us to see some of the deep currents of that era and to reacquaint ourselves with two great, unclassifiable figures.
—— former Archbishop of Canterbury
Artfully demonstrates how the minds of two individual cultural icons merge with a message that all the world needs to hear. Difficult to put down once you open the first page and begin to read.
—— author of Battlefield America and A Government of Wolves
You may think, as I at first did, that pairing a Utopian hermit monk and a demon-haunted rock star is just plain perverse or at the very least willfully paradoxical. But there you’d be dead wrong. . . . In the end it’s Bob Hudson’s love for Thomas Merton and Bob Dylan that’s the alchemical fire that makes [this book] work. As curious as this cockamamie pairing is, The Monk’s Record Player is a meditation on inspiration, contact highs, and the unknowable workings of the cosmos.
—— from foreword
Product Details
- Title : The Monk's Record Player: Thomas Merton, Bob Dylan, and the Perilous Summer of 1966
- Authors:
- Hudson, Robert
- Dalton, David
- Publisher: Eerdmans
- Publication Date: 2018
- ISBN: 9781467449496
Robert Hudson is a recognized Bob Dylan scholar, a member of the International Thomas Merton Society, and a veteran editor who has worked with a number of best-selling authors, including Philip Yancey, Walter Wangerin Jr., Leonard Sweet, and Lee Strobel. He and his wife, Shelley, play in the old-time string band Gooder'n Grits.