Interminable book provides details about every track Dylan has recorded to the time it was published. For a long-time Dylan fan, it will give you a little insight and bring back some great memories of older songs you haven't listened to lately. But the book is so full of contradictions (sometimes within a page or two), questionable info, and unsubstantiated opinion that it gets to be really annoying at times. Obviously, the amount of research (or at least Googling) was immense, but the authors don't write that well, and their opinion on individual songs gets too lost in pointing out when a guitar is slightly out of tune or Dylan makes a noise while singing into the mike too closely or there is a less than perfect splice in the tape--instead of focusing on how good the song really is, which, in Dylan's case, overrides the technical quality of any performance. In many cases, the authors' rating of a song is vastly different from my own, and the authors also seem to have a deep fascination with Dylan's Christian period that is perhaps a little out of proportion. What does become clear, however, especially if you were a listener to Dylan's wonderful radio program, is that when he picks some obscure old song to record, he knows exactly what he is doing. So, I can't really recommend this for reading straight through, although that is what I have done. But the next time you pull out Highway 61 Revisited, you might read a a few pages here and learn something--or find something to disagree with! I bought this as a cheap Kindle Book (I think $1.99) on Dylan's 75th birthday, and at that price it is okay. Now that Dylan is a Nobel Prize Winner, this really isn't the place to find out why. With luck, someone will write a better account of his work, although that could take a lifetime--just as long as Dylan has spent creating it. ( )

This is a Dylanologist's book, but I am not enough of a fanboy to examine each of the known recordings by Bob Dylan as minutely as this. Although it is good to know which musicians played on each album track, I don't need or want to know all the recording details, e.g., how many takes of each song. That said, this is an interesting effort to trace the roots of all of Dylan's recorded (and released) songs, a comprehensive catalog of his recordings and a great source of Dylan trivia.. ( )