Highway 61, Visited

\ New York Times: "IN his recently published memoir, 'Chronicles: Volume One,' Bob Dylan describes what may or may not be a typical night at home. He and a houseguest, Bono of U2, stay up all night and polish off a case of Guinness while talking about their shared literary hero Jack Kerouac and their mutual love of back-roads America. 'I told him that if he wants to see the birthplace of America, he should go to Alexandria, Minn.,' where, he explains, 'the Vikings came and settled in the 1300's.' Mr. Dylan then becomes Bono's unbidden tour guide, mapping out a road trip with specific instructions to follow an unnamed roadway along 'the river up through Winona, Lake City, Frontenac.'Curious, I opened a road atlas to discover that the only road that follows the Mississippi through those towns is Highway 61, the fabled Blues Highway that runs from the Mississippi Delta through Duluth, where Mr. Dylan was born, and that Mr. Dylan mythologized in his 1965 masterpiece 'Highway 61 Revisited.' I don't know if Bono ever made the trip, but if he did, he was in for some surprises. So I discovered in early June when, armed with a stack of Dylan CD's and accompanied by my former college roommate Doc Wilson, now a Chicago-based neuropsychologist, I drove from Winona to Alexandria, using Mr. Dylan's directions to Bono as my map. I ignored the Interstate - the town sits alongside I-94, about two hours west of Minneapolis the way most people drive it - and instead took the much longer route Mr. Dylan suggested. Obviously, Mr. Dylan, who grew up 150 miles northeast of Alexandria, in the remote Mesabi Iron Range town of Hibbing, wanted his Irish friend to see the countryside of his native state."

The books that changed the world

Shakespeare makes it on to the list but there is no place for Austen, Dickens or - thankfully - the Da Vinci Code. Melvyn Bragg is to host a new TV series, 12 Books That Changed The World, about the tomes which have shaped our lives. They include the first rule book of the Football Association, drawn up in 1863 and the basis for the modern game. The King James Bible is in the list, along with the Magna Carta and Darwin's The Origin of Species. Also included is Married Love by family planning campaigner Marie Stopes. Published in 1918, it was the UK's first sex manual and was branded obscene by the church and the medical establishment."