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 Chronicles: Volume One is the first installment of Bob Dylan's autobiography. Instead of a chronological telling of his life's story, it's a recollection of his early influences and inspirations, including personal, musical, and literary ones. Dylan sets the bulk of the book around his arrival in Greenwich Village in 1961, but takes digressions in time and place to his earlier life in Minnesota or later in life at Woodstock. It's not just a trip through parts of Dylan's life, but his creative process and thoughts also. Chronicles: Volume One has received wide acclaim with the New York Times saying, "Yet Chronicles is hardly tame. It is lucid without being linear, swirling through time without losing its strong storytelling thread."

 Suze Rotolo's memoir of the sixties, when she was known as Bob Dylan's girlfriend--she appears on the cover of his second album--is a generous account of a special time and place. Dylan fans will appreciate learning how Rotolo sees their warm, sometimes tender, relationship, which ended badly. Rotolo does not use the book to settle old scores but, rather, she offers a trustworthy portrait of a protean Dylan at a point in his career where he was absorbing influences and clarifying his own self-vision. Readers will also appreciate that Rotolo has her own story to tell, of how she grew up in Queens, New York as a member of a leftist Italian family, how she developed an interest in art and folk music, and how she spent as much time as she could while in high school in Washington Square park and its environs. Rotolo tells of her own work in causes such as ban the bomb movement, as well as her jobs in theater. It is said that her interests became Dylan's for a time, and her sketches of Village regulars such as Dave Van Ronk, Richard Farina, Ian and Sylvia Tyson, and their hangouts recall an era now gone.