THE AGE OF THE ARTIST-ACTIVIST
FIFTY-FIVE YEARS AGO legendary activist and artist Harry Belafonte released his album Midnight Special, a disc celebrated both for its own musical merits and for the recording debut of a young Bob Dylan on harmonica. The next year, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan lobbed anthems like “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “A Hard Rain’s aGonna Fall” into the middle of the early 1960s protest culture. That same decade, both Belafonte and Dylan marched prominently in support of civil rights – the former alongside Martin Luther King Jr. himself – and became de facto voices for art-as-activism.
Belafonte, who turns 90 on March 1, remains politically active, endorsing Senator Bernie Sanders for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016 and serving as honorary co-chair of January’s Women’s March on Washington. The former Zoomer cover subject marks his 90th birthday with When Colors Come Together: The Legacy of Harry Belafonte, a self-curated musical anthology that includes a children’s choir recording of “When Colors Come Together (Our Island in the Sun).”
Dylan, 75, is harder to pin down – just ask the Nobel Prize committee. These days, the legendary troubadour has largely traded American politics for the American Songbook, that bastion of older artists with an eye toward both nostalgia and record sales. With two previous albums of Sinatra-inspired tunes released since 2015, Triplicate stands as the first three-disc offering of Dylan’s career. A (very) subtle form of political activism, however, may be at work here. A story in Slate won- dered if Dylan isn’t playing up the Sinatra angle so much because President Trump used “My Way” as his the tune for his first dance after his inauguration. Even if there is a disagreeable connection between Ol’ Blue Eyes and Ol’ Orange Skin, though, Dylan’s lips are sealed. —MC
IT’S AN AMERICAN CIVIL WAR REDUX, this time with drones zipping through the sky while areas of the country are destroyed, plague spreads and displaced victims are herded off into camps. Yes, American War, a debut novel set in the notso-distant future that follows a family at the heart of the conflict, was penned before the political fallout of last November’s presidential election by award-winning Canadian journalist Omar el Akkad, though some might take it as a cautionary tale. Fellow Canuck scribe Emily Schultz, whose previous award-nominated novels made fans of Margaret Atwood and Stephen King, brings readers inside another sort of American conflict – prohibition in 1920s Detroit – where one man’s death sends ripples through the underworld in Men
Walking on Water. British writer Alexander McCall Smith puts his famed No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series on hold for My Italian Bulldozer, a one-off witty tale about a down-on-hisluck food writer who winds up traversing the Tuscan countryside in a plodding bulldozer, while Swedish author Catharina IngelmanSundberg’s The Little Old Lady Behaving Badly follows a crew of crafty seniors out to separate oblivious bil- lionaires from their fortunes. Royal readers can cosy up to the next king of England with Prince Charles: The Passions and Paradoxes of an Improbable Life by Sally Bedell, who’s working her way through the Royal Family following biographies of Queen Elizabeth II and Princess Diana. And if you want to shut it all out, Solitude, by Governor General’s Awards-winner Michael Harris, serves as a manual for cutting out your life’s unwanted noise and embracing the quiet.