Very academic essays focusing on postmillennial Bob Dylan. The essays offer some historical context but really focus on the albums Love and Theft, Modern Times and Tempest and the film Masked and Anonymous as well as his live shows. The authors really do an in depth analysis of Dylan and his music. They like Dylan and do gloss over some of the criticisms. I liked some essays better than others and a few of the essays were a little dry. Any one with an interest in Dylan and his music will enjoy this book.

Tearing the World Apart is an academic leaning exploration of Bob Dylan's output of the 21st Century. In my opinion, as it misses out some of his output such as "Christmas in the Heart" it is worthy but flawed.

Dylan’s towering stature in popular culture has been assured since at least the mid-1960s but even his being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016 has not definitively settled the debate regarding his exact place in high culture, not least because his references to ‘Moby Dick’ in his Nobel Prize lecture have led to accusations of plagiarism (notably by Andrea Pitzer); the alleged plagiarism relating not even to Melville’s text but rather to the SparkNotes commentary on ‘Moby Dick’.

Accusations of this sort are nothing new and indeed have multiplied with the passage of time but they receive short shrift in ‘Tearing the World Apart’, a collection of eleven essays on Bob Dylan and the Twenty-First Century, published by the University of Mississippi Press and introduced and edited by Nina Goss and Eric Hoffman. Thus Andrea Cossu characterises the plagiarism debate as “tiresome”, and Fahri Öz approves of Richard F. Thomas’s argument that “Dylan’s borrowings” should be treated “as intertexts rather than plagiarism”: an argument akin to trying to make shoplifting appear more respectable by labelling it kleptomania.

‘Tearing the World Apart’ concerns itself with postmillennial Bob, focusing on ‘Love and Theft’ (2001), ‘Modern Times’ (2006), ‘Tempest’ (2012) and the 2003 film ‘Masked and Anonymous’. It is understandable that the authors wish to focus on original output, although the editors’ claim that they’re ignoring material such as ‘Christmas in the Heart’ (2009) “not because of any lack of quality” raises serious doubts about their understanding of that term.

This book nevertheless represents a substantial contribution to Dylan scholarship and offers much food for thought yet, at the end of the day, however acute Bob’s critics, there remains a part of Dylan that’s obstinately obtuse, and for many that’s part of his appeal.