The Sun & The Moon & The Rolling Stones

An Amazon Best Book of May 2016: Does the world really need another book about the Rolling Stones? After five highly scrutinized decades of music, drugs, busts, death, jealousy, women, and exile, there's not much new to say that hasn't been broadcast through countless books, movies, articles, and court records. But Rich Cohen's The Sun & The Moon & The Rolling Stones--based on his coverage of the band for Rolling Stone magazine in the 1990s, as well as his own lifelong obsession--asserts itself as an essential addition to the canon, earning a place on the same shelf as Keith Richards' Life and the Maysles brothers' harrowing Altamont doc, Gimme Shelter. The success is in the storytelling. Yes, it's filled with detail and stories familiar to any fan, but also driven by prose fit for his gonzo heritage: he's wild within reason and funny in the Thompson style, unafraid of contrarian pronouncements and first-person perspective, with a high hit-rate for memorable, original sentences (to which my dog-eared galley attests). Cohen, who pulled off a similar feat with Monsters, his book about the 1985 Chicago Bears, understands that writing--and reading--works when it's personal, a little bit transgressive, and a hell of a lot of fun. Just like the Stones. --Jon Foro