Rich Cohen is one of my favorite authors (of my generation we are nearly the same age). Like Cohen I grew up saturated with 1960s culture but feeling as though born too late and missed the party. Cohen was a lifelong Stones fanatic who in the early 1990s just out of college landed the dream job of working for Rolling Stone (the magazine) and given the assignment to embed with the band on tour and write a series of articles, which are the basis for the book. Turns out the band really liked Cohen and he has worked with them on other projects in years beyond. So he brings personal experience as well as his remarkable writing and insights. However most of the book is a history of the band in the 1960s during their heyday which is exactly what I wanted to know more about. A review in the SF Chronicle called it one the best books about the Stones (the others Stanley Booth’s The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones and Robert Greenfield’s S.T.P.: A Journey Through America With the Rolling Stones). I learned something interesting on nearly every page and often it transcended the Stones into a bigger tapestry of the 1960s, an era I once pined for and now better understand for better and worse. ( )