I haven't read this thread, saw multiple paragraphs from and to no one, didn't seem worth it. I did read the book though, it was good. I think the chapter on Dylan captures a lot of the sentiment around the guy at the time, not to mention the way the attention on him went from absolute clowning, for some justifiable reasons, to adulation and mimicry (hello Elijah). A little flowery, but again, not off base from the majority of the writing around Dylan when he died.
The book is a series of essays about skateboarding, which could have been lame. Writing about skateboarding is hard. It's not though, in part because it also follows a tumultuous patch in his marriage, brought on in part because of Beachy's relationship to skateboarding. It makes it particularly interesting to us older folks who have a partner that doesn't exactly get the fact that skateboarding can be a competing relationship. It makes the case that the best way to write about skateboarding is to encompass it within a life, as opposed to writing about it in a vacuum. Walker Ryan's book does a decent job of that as well.
Anyway, please proceed being mean to each other on the internet. Just thought I'd throw my two cents in on the subject line.