Dylan: A Biography

Writer Bob Spitz, author of Barefoot in Babylon, the story of the 1969 Woodstock festival, spent years researching Bob Dylan's life, interviewing people who had known him ranging back to his earliest days in Hibbing, Minnesota. Spitz did get people to talk on the record, and while his book collects myriad quotes from Dylan associates, the overall tone of Dylan: A Biography tends to veer toward being unaccountably mean-spirited. The book does document the recollections of some people important in Dylan's life, but it's an uneven read thanks to the persistently negative tone and Spitz's penchant for writing scenes in a hipster style that usually tends to work against the subject (who is, after all, more than hip enough on his own). --Robert McNamara