Fans will savor rich, long Dylan bio

The second installment of Ian Bell's two-part biography of Bob Dylan, Time Out of Mind, is a compelling, focused examination of the latter half of the elusive singer-songwriter's life and career, starting off with his acclaimed Blood on the Tracks album in 1975 and bringing readers close to the present day.

For Dylan's many obsessive fans, who have been offered a wealth of analyses of this singular artist over the years, Bell delivers the goods. Chapters are heavy with engrossing and sometimes surprising details of Dylan's most potent works and cringe-worthy missteps during this time, all told in the Scottish journalist's sharp-sighted, biting style.

At its core, Bell's ambitious work is more of an analysis of Dylan's tangle of identities and creative visions than a standard biography of an arena-filling musician. He meticulously documents Dylan's oeuvre since 1975, including a lengthy stretch of artistic decline spanning the 1980s when the singer-songwriter acclaimed as a dazzling, once-in-a-lifetime genius for much of his youth was mostly being written off as a contrary has-been by his 40s.