First Negatives, then positives:
Negatives:
1. Not all of the songs have interpretations of the lyrics. Most, but not all. The stories told in each song's profile follow no formula or criteria - some cover lyrics, some music, some production, some inspiration, etc. Those stories are great and I like their inclusion, but I much prefer that every song had a lyrical explanation.
2. The author at times seems to marginalize the amount of Christian reference in U2's music. It just doesn't come up in proportion to how big it has been throughout U2's history.
3. Where is "Holy Joe" ? Other B-Sides are covered!
4. At times it's difficult to determine which points are the author's speculation and which are his conveyances of U2's thoughts and ideas. He admits in the introduction that some editorial speculation and interpretation - but I'd like some clarity about which is which, because I'm more interested in what U2 has to say than reading Stoke's brainstorming about his take.
As for the positives:
1. The book is very comprehensive (except for Holy Joe!) and very well organized - chronologically by album with a section in the back covering B-Sides, and other stuff not on albums. It gives a 2 or 3 page 'profile' on each song with several nice color pictures.
2. Despite my crticism above about not offering a lyric interpretation or explanation of every song, Stokes did a great job of finding some very interestings stories on other aspects of how songs came together.
3. And the last thing is that there don't seem to be any, or at least not many other books like this out there. I know there are others on this topic (covering U2 song by song) but the ones I've seen don't do as good of a job. In fact, the others I've seen actually make the line between editorializing and describing U2 by their own words - even more unclear. So if there are better works of this sort on U2 out there - I haven't seen them.
Enjoy the book!