Rating: 
Summary: Solid but incomplete-feeling
Review: "According To the Rolling Stones" is a must-have for the Stones fan, but is hampered by the fact that you must already be a fan to know fully what's going on. With amazing pictures but incomplete text, this is a pretty good but unsatisfying coffee table book.It charts the Rolling Stones from their respective childhoods, to becoming the baddest rock band in England. Then it follows them into parenthood, marriage, addiction, rehab, the death of messed-up bandmate Brian Jones and the near-breakup of the band in the 1980s. Music, mayhem, and the occasional arrest make up this book. The pictures virtually MAKE this book. Many of them are ones I hadn't seen before, and there are actually more candids than posed pics. Pics of Mick Jagger being punched in the street, Keith Richards playing with his son on a tire swing, and the Stones examining possible cover photos are among these. The pictures have an intimate quality, and many of them get across the camaraderie or alienation between the Stones. One of the major problems with the book is the lack of insights into the dynamics behind the music. Wives, girlfriends, children, fellow musician friends and so on are barely mentioned, occasionally pictured (Marianne Faithfull is barely visible behind her huge hat). It feels incomplete to have no view of what these guys are like to anyone except one another. If they had included interviews from more than just the Stones themselves, it would feel more rounded, like the Aerosmith autobiography "Walk This Way," which included interviews from just about everybody associated with the band. And about half of the essays don't add to the book's content at all, especially the ones that analyze the Stones from a distance instead of talking about the writer's personal experience. "According to the Rolling Stones" will delight fans of the Stones, especially those who like to see backstage pictures and hear how this song or that song came to be. But though this book is a hefty snack, I finished it feeling vaguely hungry.
Rating:
Summary: Solid but incomplete-feeling
Review: "According To the Rolling Stones" is a must-have for the Stones fan, but is hampered by the fact that you must already be a fan to know fully what's going on. With amazing pictures but incomplete text, this is a pretty good but unsatisfying coffee table book. It charts the Rolling Stones from their respective childhoods, to becoming the baddest rock band in England. Then it follows them into parenthood, marriage, addiction, rehab, the death of messed-up bandmate Brian Jones and the near-breakup of the band in the 1980s. Music, mayhem, and the occasional arrest make up this book. The pictures virtually MAKE this book. Many of them are ones I hadn't seen before, and there are actually more candids than posed pics. Pics of Mick Jagger being punched in the street, Keith Richards playing with his son on a tire swing, and the Stones examining possible cover photos are among these. The pictures have an intimate quality, and many of them get across the camaraderie or alienation between the Stones. One of the major problems with the book is the lack of insights into the dynamics behind the music. Wives, girlfriends, children, fellow musician friends and so on are barely mentioned, occasionally pictured (Marianne Faithfull is barely visible behind her huge hat). It feels incomplete to have no view of what these guys are like to anyone except one another. If they had included interviews from more than just the Stones themselves, it would feel more rounded, like the Aerosmith autobiography "Walk This Way," which included interviews from just about everybody associated with the band. And about half of the essays don't add to the book's content at all, especially the ones that analyze the Stones from a distance instead of talking about the writer's personal experience. "According to the Rolling Stones" will delight fans of the Stones, especially those who like to see backstage pictures and hear how this song or that song came to be. But though this book is a hefty snack, I finished it feeling vaguely hungry.
Rating: 
Summary: GREAT BOOK, NOT TOO BAD LOOKING EITHER
Review: A couple hundred years from now historians will write about the endurance of the 'flash in the pan' phenomenon called, pop culture. ACCORDING TO THE ROLLING STONES will certainly be one of their reference books. This is history as it should be told--as it is lived--in all its informal, intimate, gritty, and compelling detail. ACCORDING TO THE ROLLING STONES presents unique privileged perspectives of the evolution of rock from the earliest days to the present. Essays from friends and colleagues plus hundreds of photos spanning the Stones' career enhance the interviews of Mick, Keith, Charlie and Ronnie. Older fans will fondly remember the 'Bad Boys of British Pop' as an enduring icon of the extraordinary sixties and seventies. New fans will discover the history of the Stones through the group's lives and their music as told by the mythmakers themselves. Fans of pop culture will value these memoirs of the group that lived it.
Rating:
Summary: all about the music
Review: According to the Rolling Stones is really a lot of fun. Leaving aside the great pictures, the reproductions of some of Ronnie Wood's portraits, the essays by famous fans and friends like Giorgio Gomelsky, Marshall Chess, Sheryl Crow, and Don Was, the book is great for a simple reason: the story of the Rolling Stones is told by the Rolling Stones in a perfect Rolling Stones style.
There's a lot of verve in the way the whole story is told and put together. For example: Keith Richards says he is very thankful to Andrew Oldham for forcing the Stones to write their own songs. Keith says that 'he put a guitar in the kitchen and locked the door and we stayed there all night'. Mick Jagger's reply arrives ten lines later: 'Keith likes to tell the story about the kitchen, God bless him...but he didn't literally lock us in'.
The story told by the Rolling Stones is made up by many different stories: the London years, the royal exile, the Stones' many addictions, the great world tours and so on. But of all the stories, the best story is a story that many biographies of the Stones generally overlook: how the Rolling Stones' music came into being. In 'According to the Rolling Stones', it is possible to find quite a lot on the music of the Stones. Rob Bowman's essay takes a very close look at the way in which the Stones wrote their songs and how the songwriting was deeply affected, after 1967, by Keith's fascination with open tunings. But even more interesting is Keith's account of the musical potential of playing an acoustic guitar in a tape recorder and so on.
It is this attention to the Rolling Stones' music that makes this book more interesting than most books about the Stones.
Rating:
Summary: Not Too Bad - Not Too Good Either
Review: Content is weak and very incomplete. Furthermore, a little too much Brian bashing for my taste. Good photographs however. A much better Stones book is Bill Wyman's. There is a reason why According to the Rolling Stones is selling at $24.00 down from the original $40.00 - it probably is not selling well, and for good reason. There are better Stones books than these two also out there.......check them out. I remember In Their Own words being entertaining, just interviews.....either Mick Jagger or Rolling Sones, can't remember. David Dalton has a great book: The first twenty years.
Rating:
Summary: it's not one of those
Review: Did people seriously expect a book entitled "According to the Rolling Stones" to be another lurid tell-all, or another comprehensive history? This book isn't one of those, and doesn't pretend to be. It's the four current Stones presenting themselves as they feel like presenting themselves, and I couldn't put it down. The pictures are gorgeous, and the Stones' comments are fascinatingly expressive - whether or not what they think and feel is as sweet, sentimental, smooth or studied as some people might like. Which is exactly as it should be, with the Stones. Stanley Booth's "Dance with the Devil" is available in English as "The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones", and it is indeed brilliant. Bill Wyman's books are also fantastic - and since they already exist, it would be pretty lame if this book undertook to rehash or rival them. Instead, "According to" gives us a stream of wonderful close-up impressions of Keith being inimitably, perfectly Keith - Mick doin his thing - Charlie's laconic eloquence about what matters - Ronnie interweaving it all with his sparklies. The parts about Brian moved me to tears - and sure they contradict each other (why shouldn't they?! they're musicians, not historians!) - and Bill *does* have astonishingly small hands - and asking why Mick Taylor isn't in this book is about as relevant as asking why he isn't on the Stones' recent albums. This is a seriously gorgeous and gratifying book. Just enjoy it. That's what it's for.
Rating:
Summary: Not very good
Review: I expected a better book from a band who has millions of dollars to pay a professional editor and researchers. From the interviews I see that excepting Keith, they didnt help much. I wish the Stones would come back with a GREAT last album and then say goodbye. I dont like how cynically they have reduced everything to multi millionaire business.
Rating:
Summary: Amazing! Great read and great pics!
Review: I honestly doubt that a few of the reviewers in here actually read this book. They may have skimmed it, but from what they've written (eg: no hint at Keith's drug problems??---GET OUT!)it's pretty easy to see that they most certainly did not read the book on any serious level. This book is amazing! When I read it I felt like I was actually talking to the Stones and that they were sharing many interesting and informative details about their lives and the lives of those who influenced them musically and otherwise. If you're a Stones fan or very interested in the history of R&R as it applies where this band is concerned, this book is a MUST!
Rating:
Summary: Great Book for Stones Fans or anyone who loves Rock and Roll
Review: If you are a Stones fan, you'll love this book. I've been a Stones fan for years and seen many books about them, but According To The Rolling Stones has tons of pictures, stories, and information that are new to me. The lay-out of the text and photos makes it a great coffee table book, and the writing by the Stones themselves is fascinating. I actually preferred this book to The Beatles Anthology, but that is probably because I prefer the Stones to the Beatles, not because of the quality of either of the books. Not only is it good for fans of the band, any one who has an appreciation of rock and roll history will learn a lot from this book.
Rating:
Summary: According to the Rolling Stones
Review: Inevitably, this official autobiography of the Rolling Stones will be compared with The Beatles Anthology. Not only does the Stones's book employ the same alternating-quote format, but it also shares the same publisher. But whereas Anthology attempted to be an exhaustive and lavishly illustrated Beatles history, with comments from key figures outside the band, According is more modest. Taken from new interviews, the only voices and perspectives belong to the current Stones lineup-Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts, and Ronnie Wood. No historical interviews represent deceased band founder Brian Jones; nor does his replacement guitarist, Mick Taylor, participate. Even more disconcerting, Bill Wyman, the Stones's bassist for 30 years, is only mentioned a handful of times (perhaps in retribution for his publishing a coffee-table memoir, Rolling with the Stones). Though the Stones touch only lightly on many aspects of their long career, their comments are often entertaining and thoughtful, especially those from the uncharacteristically verbose Watts (who also serves as consulting editor) and the always colorful Richards. The book is richly illustrated but eschews memorabilia (reproduced in abundance in Wyman's book) for photographs and portraits, many rarely or never before seen. This is essential for Stones fans, though Wyman's tome and Stephen Davis's Old Gods Almost Dead are needed to fill out the details of this legendary band's story. [Publication of this book is set to coincide with the end of the Stones's 40 Licks World Tour
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