'Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine'

Joe Hagan, Knopf, 560 pages, $29.95. Jann Wenner doesn't like the way a new biography of him turned out. He's called the book "deeply flawed and tawdry." Maybe that's because that's a pretty good description of Wenner's life, which the author, Joe Hagan, explores with apparent honesty and allegiance to the truth. Wenner and his magazine in recent years have been equated with journalistic sins because of a now debunked story of gang rape at the University of Virginia. Yet at one time the magazine was revolutionary, for example its coverage of the violent death at the Altamont Free Concert in northern California. Wenner — who co-founded Rolling Stone in 1967 — is portrayed as a driven visionary: wildly ambitious, conflicted, arrogant and insecure. Although he is sometimes tough on Wenner, Hagan is more than fair. Ultimately, he seems to agree with former Rolling Stone editor Will Dana that Wenner, though torn between the virtues and vices of his generation, is "51 percent good." Just last month, Wenner, 71, said he would sell his controlling share of Rolling Stone, thus ending the era that began in a San Francisco loft in the fall of 1967 when the first issue came off the presses — the brainchild of this precocious 21-year-old Berkeley dropout with bell-bottom pants and a big idea … and an unparalleled sense of what the 1960s meant to a generation. Through his nuanced portrait of Wenner, Hagan shows us how thoroughly the publication reflected its founder, warts and all.

MARGARET SULLIVAN, WASHINGTON POST