Bob Dylan

"This is a big, superbly detailed and important biography of the man who was one of the most powerful seminal influences on the turbulent 1960s - a brilliantly gifted Minnesota kid who came forth with a secret bag of torments to write and sing those songs whose sounds and ideas are today's household words: 'Blowin' in the Wind' and 'The Times They are A' Changin'.

What makes Scaduto's study exceptional and undoubtedly controversial - is the unretouched portrait of Dylan that emerges: a tormented man `who in the author's view may be "clinically insane', a disastrously unhappy figure who denied his Jewishness and, deliberately cultivating a ruthless mythomania, advanced his career by " building a character that would sell".

Once he achieved celebrity, Dylan né Zimmerman lashed out in every direction. Scaduto
scarcely disguises an ostensible affair with gentle Joan Baez and makes no bones about Dylan's encounters with drugs.

The vertiginous changes in Dylan's personality - especially since the 1966 motorcycle accident which merely enhanced his legend, clearly have roots somewhere in the schizoid search-for-identity which Scaduto depicts in unflinching terms throughout