... makes phenomenally captivating reading for any Dylan devotée, revealing unseen dimensions of the mercurial Nobel laureate, and much to surprise and delight even careful readers of Heylin’s earlier work.

If anyone is entitled to write this exhaustive biography, it’s the man who was described by Rolling Stone in 2016 as 'perhaps the world’s authority on all things Dylan.' And if he is as jaw-droppingly good at his job as his subject is at music, Heylin can also be just as prickly. He takes delicious pleasure in throwing darts at Dylan’s other chroniclers, calling one a 'minor writer,' another a 'largely unloved scribe'.

Peppered with fact-checking footnotes to point out where others have got it wrong (or where Dylan has lied), the book really comes alive at the beginning and the end, when Heylin goes beyond the endless details to capture his subject’s situation with sympathy.

More than a conventional, or conventionally readable, biography, A Restless, Hungry Feeling feels more like a hefty appendix to extant Dylan bios, or an advanced research seminar in Dylanology.

As a prose stylist, Heylin’s a square, his sentences padded out with cliché and hackneyed metaphor...At its absolute nadir, this work, the first volume in a two-part biography of Dylan, reads like an inexplicably angry sessionography. But he is good for the facts.

Virtually no one has written as much about Bob Dylan as Heylin, yet he has more to say.

Heylin’s endeavor to understand all things Dylan might never be fully realized, but this book is filled with absorbing details that help flesh out this most elusive of characters. What sets the book apart from other biographies is Heylin’s access to Dylan’s archive, held temporarily at Tulsa’s Gilcrease Museum, with its collection of manuscripts, recordings, and outtakes from documentaries.

Even with those documents, not to mention Dylan’s own autobiography, Chronicles, and hundreds of interviews and press conferences over the years, the story of how Bobby Zimmerman from Minnesota became one of music’s most influential and enduring artists remains murky. To his credit, Heylin leans into the confusion, documenting who said what and how they would know even though it makes some parts, especially the chapters on Dylan’s early years, hard to follow. We still don’t even get a straight story on the origin of the name change.