OK....prodded by an article on Brian Jones in Playboy magazine, I wanted to learn more about the Stones' early years. (Bein a diehard Beatles fan my education was lacking in the Jagger et al department.) There were quite a few to choose from out there and I settled on this one because I thought it looked the most promising to satisfy my curiosity. The author rambles. His sentences are a paragraph long with commas everywhere. The middle of the sentance goes off onto another subject all together. To be fair, the tangents are relevant, but it is a little confusing after awhile. If you all ready have a basic knowledge of the names and places of early 60s music scene, Jazz, R&B, Rock n Roll fusions, then you can probably navigate through this chronological journey ok, but I was lost a little (and I remember the 60s pretty well) and found myself re-reading passages to get the players straight. The author jumped from character to character and then back again. Only about half the book had anything to do with the Stones themselves. It was thorough to a fault and teased with mentions of youngsters Clapton, Framptom, Nash and other 60s icons that came and went through the Stones' world. So....did it satisfy my curiosity? Nope. It stops just when it was getting to the good parts. Only the Epilouge alludes to the release of Satisfaction and the aftermath, and the original Stones today. (Brian Jones' death is a single sentence, a statement of fact with out any other comment at all) This is truly a story of the "beginning" ONLY. It is not a history of the Rolling Stones, but rather a story of how a seed became a small stem that promised to become a hearty plant. If that is what you are looking for then this is it. Detailed and insightful as to the birth of Rock N Roll from it's R&B and Jazz parents, but thin as to information about the Rolling Stones, and their rise to lasting players on a world stage.