Review by Booklist Review
In just under 1,000 pages, Spitz offers a fresh, terrifically entertaining perspective on the world's most famous rock group. The book is packed with details and anecdotes that bring the Fab Four to life. Immensely talented but humanly flawed, they created remarkable music during an extraordinary time and were often caught up in events and circumstances beyond their control. At first amused by Beatlemania, their attitudes changed to horror when the roar of the crowds came to include death threats, and obligations became unrelenting. Spitz retells many familiar stories: when John met Paul, the triumph in America, the infamous "butcher cover" of Yesterday and Today0 , the debacle in Manila where the Beatles unintentionally jilted First Lady Imelda Marcos, the Beatles-are-more-popular-than-Jesus comment, the remarkable response to Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, 0 manager Brian Epstein's death, and the breakup. Good though less well known is the meeting with Elvis in the King's rented house in Bel Air, California; the Beatles, nervous in the presence of a boyhood idol, were unsure about how to act and resorted to embarrassing silence. Spitz's group portrait should now be considered the definitive Beatles biography, especially for new generations of Beatles enthusiasts. --June Sawyers Copyright 2005 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
With this massive opus, veteran music journalist Spitz (Dylan: A Biography) tells the definitive story of the band that sparked a cultural revolution. Calling on books, articles, radio programs and primary interviews, Spitz follows the band from each member's family origins in working-class Liverpool to the band's agonizing final days. Spitz's unflinching biography reveals that not only did the Beatles pioneer a new era of rock but they also were on the cutting edge of rock star excess, from their 1961 amphetamine-fueled sets in the clubs of Hamburg to their eventual appetites for stronger drugs, including marijuana, LSD, cocaine and, eventually for John Lennon, heroin. Sex was also part of the equation; in 1962, when the band cut its first audition for Sir George Martin, all four members had a venereal disease, and both John's and Paul McCartney's girlfriends were pregnant. Spitz details the tangled web of bad business deals that flowed from novice manager Brian Epstein (though the heavily conflicted Epstein can be forgiven since he was in uncharted territory). Although this is a hefty volume steeped in research, Spitz writes economically, and with flair, letting the facts and characters speak for themselves. In doing so, he captures an ironic sadness that accompanied the Beatles' runaway success-how their dreams of stardom, once realized, became a prison, forcing the band to spend large parts of their youth in hotel rooms to avoid mobs and to stage elaborate escapes from literally life-threatening situations after appearances. As with all great history writing, Spitz both captures a moment in time and humanizes his subjects. While some will blanch at the unsettling dark sides of the Beatles, most will come to appreciate the band even more for knowing the incredible personal odysseys they endured. 32 pages of b&w photos. Agent, Sloan Harris. 196,500 first printing; major ad/promo. (Nov. 7) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
There are hundreds of Beatles books, but this one reputedly is no cut-and-paste job, relying on multitudinous new interviews and previously untapped sources. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
In time for the 40th anniversary of "Paperback Writer" comes this thousand-pages-give-or-take-a-few, overblown account of the already obsessively chronicled Fab Four. The Beatles come in for some rough treatment, à la Albert Goldman, at the hands of Spitz (Shoot Out the Lights, 1995, etc.), who seems taken only with the always affable Ringo Starr. To his credit, he gets the origins of Ringo's nickname right, something many of the 500-plus books on the Beatles haven't managed. To his credit, too, he works with a broad range of reference materials, correcting the record at points, amplifying it at others, and here and there making news: It may surprise many readers, for one thing, to know that the Sgt. Pepper sessions were energized by cocaine, and to learn of the band's ruthlessness in conquering the Liverpool music scene--which included stealing Ringo from a rival group. Still, Spitz stacks up demerits. Like Goldman, he seems to work from a deep dislike for John Lennon, who was, by most accounts, nowhere near as demonic as Spitz has it; the dislike deepens when Yoko Ono, self-absorbed dragon lady, comes into the picture ("she jumped into the smoky spotlight, clutching the mike with both hands and screeching into it like a wounded animal"). Of Lennon the drug-dependent bad boy, Spitz writes: "With his painfully thin frame, gaunt face, stringy, unkempt hair, and bloodshot eyes, John looked demonic, like a zombie had claimed his tormented soul." Paul McCartney and George Harrison have it easier; they're merely egomaniacal and spoiled. Coupled with pet peeves, a tin ear (do gargoyles caper?) and some curious notions (that, for one, Harrison professed "traditional Christianity"), this obese book seems less the "definitive biography" Spitz proclaims than another exercise in ax-grinding for profit. For completists, a necessity. Others will want to consult Hunter Davies's The Beatles, which, though 38 years old and problematic in itself, is a pleasure to read. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
