This year's biggest music biography, Neil Young's memoir is absolutely fascinating. The singer writes candidly, revealing much about the life experiences which have influenced his song-writing.

Neil Young has never been your average rock star and this is not your average rock star autobiography . . . Over the course of its 500 pages, Waging Heavy Peace is variously wildly idiosyncratic, unpredictable, bafflingly digressive, wryly funny, deeply moving, painfully honest . . . infuriatingly elusive and shot through with moments of rare insight and beauty, which you might say makes it the perfect literary counterpart to the 50-year career it describes

He's talking to you, not at you, unravelling himself as well, and you don't want it to end . . . You see rock and roll history from the inside out, and in the present tense

Young appears bounteous and joyful, a genuinely happy hippy . . . Unusually for a rock memoir, this one is almost completely angst-free

Dryly hilarious . . . poignant . . . Waging Heavy Peace shows that Young is still in full possession of that stubborn, brilliant, one-of-a-kind instrument

A real treat . . . he writes openly and movingly abut the key figures in his life...you feel you know Young better for reading it

A ride through Young's many obsessions . . . Waging Heavy Peace eschews chronology and skips the score-settling and titillation of other rocker biographies. Still, Young shows a little leg and has some laughs. The operatics of the rock life give way to signal family events, deconstructions of his musical partnerships and musings on the natural world. It is less a chronicle than a journal of self-appraisal

There is a Jumpin’ Jack Flash liveliness in Goodall’s approach

Who better to demystify the origins of music and trace the evolution of this most universal of artistic disciplines?

The Story of Music is a lively zip through some 45 millennia … jumping back and forth between classical, folk and pop

He starts right at the beginning, with 25,000-year-old bone flutes ... It's a huge brief, made huger by Goodall's alertness to new thinking in scholarly circles, and his fondness for interesting asides ... a racily written, learned and often shrewdly insightful book

A roller-coaster ride, which Goodall tells with verve... a racily written, learned and often shrewdly insightful book

An accessible guide to roughly 42,000 years of music in just over 300 pages … The Story of Music is a clever, engaging read

Howard Goodall’s beautifully clear and compelling account is both a hymn to human endeavour and a groundbreaking map of man’s musical journey

Goodall's distinguisihing gift is his ability to explain the mechanics of music instead of gliding hastily over them. He is fearless in unknotting those medieval mysteries of oranum and isorhythms, as well as chords, triads, fugues, keys, equal temperament, atonality, dodecaphony and blues

A clear and compelling account which is a hymn to human endeavor and a groundbreaking musical journey

Fascinating – as well as illuminating on how music works

At his best, Goodall has a facility for lively shorthand…

This ambitious and all embracing history of 40, 000 years of music will have you dancing in the aisles

[Rod] has warm good humour and a nice line in self-deprecation...He wears it well—and tells it even better.

By some distance the most entertaining of last year’s...rock star memoirs.

This book takes readers on an adventure, that is at times deeply moving, through the life of one of the UK's greatest singers.

Ruthlessly entertaining