White Rabbit, London, 2021. Good secondhand copy.

This is a story that starts in the New Jersey suburbs in the early 1960s. Steven Van Zandt, just a boy, was already impatient to get going. Call it restlessness. Call it ambition. Call it the need for adventure. Whatever it was, when rock and roll arrived, it was a rescue mission. It freed Van Zandt to chart his own course, and he did: first in teen bands, then on the bar-band circuit, then in arenas and stadiums all over the world.

Unrequired Infatuations chronicles every twist and turn of Van Zandt's vibrant, varied, and always surprising life: his early years as a rock-and-roll disciple, his rise to fame through boardwalks and bar bands, his trailblazing decade as a hard-rocking activist. All the ups and downs, the triumphs and the troughs, the false starts and the times he pulled out all the stops. Throughout it all, his passion has drawn order out of chaos, driven his story forward.