Book Review: Dreamers & Misfits

Well yesterday, February 12, was the 40th anniversary of the release of Moving Pictures, so I’m about a day late in getting this out, but that’s OK. Fitting that Neil was an inspiration for me to write, my article on the anniversary of his death was the first I posted here, and now as a tribute to “Bubba’s Book Club,” my first book review is of one about Rush fans.

About a year ago, Ed Stenger over at RushIsABand posted that Mr. Alexander Hellene was writing a book about Rush fans and that he was taking a survey to collect data. Of course, your humble blogger jumped right to the survey link to fill out his responses. To be honest, I forgot all about it until late in the year when Ed put up another post that Hellene had published his book. This past Thursday, while waiting, seemingly all day, for the 85K mile service on my Z, using the Kindle app on my phone I finished reading Dreamers & Misfits over lunch.

This is the first work I’ve read of Mr. Hellene, who usually writes fiction. It’s an easy read and as the book progresses, he intersperses comments from the nearly 700 fan responses, sometimes for pages at a time, which are apropos to the subject of the chapter. While I was genuinely honored to see my own comments included, I thought the most touching were those of Mrs. Laura O, who commented,

We have Neil’s words engraved on our wedding rings, and we used his words when we can’t find how to say it ourselves, RUSH lyrics are our secret code.

Some fans were more forthcoming it seems, in their responses, and Hellene includes three full fan profiles interspersed through out the book. There are also several interviews in the appendices, and no book about Rush fans would be complete without an interview with Ms. Donna Halper. However, for me the most interesting was that with an Orthodox bishop, the Metropolitan Tikhon Mollard. I found his comments particularly thoughtful and poignant, especially this:

Ultimately, I think Neil was searching throughout his life for “the real relation, the underlying theme.” For me, those are found in Christ and the Church but for him they are found elsewhere. But the fact that he was searching for answers to those questions reveal him to be a genuinely human person looking for honesty and integrity, which is what we should all strive for.

I also particularly enjoyed the author’s closing “Lessons I have Learned from Rush,” and laughed out loud when I read the first one:

When the world expects you to do the same thing over and over, you drop a twenty-minute sci-fi epic on them and walk away.

In the interview with Ed, the author mentioned that he had been checking RushIsABand for fifteen years, which seemed a rather long time until I paused, reflected, and realized that it had been at least as long for me as I had started visiting that website sometime in late 2005.

For me, this was an enjoyable book, one peppered with tidbits and details from those of us who love, appreciate, and respect the three artists who called themselves Rush. It is an excellent addition to my Rush collection; which you can see I’m rapidly running out of room for!

If you are a casual Rush fan, but never taken the time to examine why you are, or even if you are a bit more hardcore like myself, or if you have a Rush fan in your life, be they male or female (yes there are female Rush fans), you will enjoy reading or gifting this book. In Navy parlance, BRAVO ZULU Mr. Hellene and thank you for writing about all us Rush fans!

Namaste,

Mark Stansell

February 13, 2021