
Gilead
2004 · 247 pages
John Ames, an old preacher in Iowa, is dying and sets his life down for the seven-year-old son who will not remember him. Robinson makes an ordinary afternoon feel like grace.
★ 7.7

John Ames, an old preacher in Iowa, is dying and sets his life down for the seven-year-old son who will not remember him. Robinson makes an ordinary afternoon feel like grace.

Dylan refuses the story everyone wants. He writes instead about borrowed couches in Greenwich Village in 1961 and a New Orleans studio in 1989, in prose as good as his songs.

Born out of wedlock in the Caribbean, Hamilton reached New York at seventeen, wrote most of the Federalist Papers, and built American finance. Chernow drives it all toward the duel.