Great starting point; not-so-great ending point

books:


	• The Beatles : The Biography Bob Spitz, 2005 - 992 pages average customer review:based on 205 reviews view larger image
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Best Beatles Book

Best book I've ever read about the Beatles. Bob Spitz writes very well and puts you right there in the room with them. It's a delight to have so many pages to go. I don't want it to end. It's Fabulous!

Fascinating Despite the Factual Errors

Let's face it: Beatles fans know their trivia after forty-five years of discussion about a group that was one of the major catalysts for societal and cultural changes in the sixties and beyond. This book, while highly interesting and well written, just gets under the skin with so many factual errors splattered across the pages. It is amazing that the text was not vetted by whatever editors were assigned to birth this book on rock and roll legends. As another reviewer has noted, the biography appears to have been rushed to market.

All that having been said, it does offer fantastic stories about the Beatles that fall into various categories: stories we've all heard before but are here viewed from a slightly different narrative and psychological viewpoint; stories we've heard that have new information; and, thankfully, many stories that are brought to light for the first time.

More time is spent on the band's formation than it's break-up, which seems an inexcusable error since any comprehensive biography needs to cover the entire life of its subject(s). The break-up has always been a source of great discussion, with numerous accounts as to how, when, and why the band fell apart. Even THE BEATLES ANTHOLOGY proved that there are different perspectives on many aspects of the group's history from the surviving members themselves. So was it Paul's overbearing nature? Yoko's constant presence?; George's feeling that he could live quite happily without the melodrama?; or was it just that it was time for four creative geniuses to go their own ways? Was it John or Paul who pulled the plug ... or pulled the plug harder? This book doesn't delve deeply enough on a crucial era in Beatles' history. Spitz seems to favor Paul's personality over Johns's, but regardless, the end of the book skimps on too many important details.

Despite its problems, this book is an important addition to the history of four very talented men who were in the right place at the right time. For a true Beatles' fan, there's no such thing as too much information about a band that still serves as inspiration for contemporary artists. It's a good book. Period.

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Must-Read for Beatles Fans

This is an excellent and engrossing all-around history of the Beatles. It starts with the life of John Lennon as an infant and moves along as Lennon meets up with various people who become his band mates. The band becomes the Beatles as Paul and George are added and Pete Best and other are shunted aside and as Ringo is added. The details of the lives and activities of the Beatles - the imperfect musicianship, the arguments, the drugs, the venereal disease picked up in Hamburg, the formative experiences that serve as inspiration for many of their best-known - is well-detailed.

If you are a music scholar or have scrutinized the Beatles' backgrounds, then this book is probably not for you. But if you're a big fan and would like to know something of the backgrounds of the Big Four, their personalities, what Beatlemania was all about, who they slept with, how they got inspiration, and so on, you'll really enjoy this. It's a fun read.

It is completely accurate in all respects? Judging by the other reviews, probably not. But I doubt it is possible to assemble a comprehensive and accurate biography. So much happened and most of that is 40-plus years ago. But the book provides an compelling and absorbing picture of the dynamic of the group, the forces that drove them to make great music, the forces that drove them to compete against one another and that ultimately drove them to break up. Even at approximately 900 pages (hardback verson) it was impossible to put down.

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Great starting point; not-so-great ending point

I have read maybe ten books about the Beatles, and Mr. Spitz's effort is a "tweener." It's better than some, not as good as others, and would make a great "if-you-could-only-read-one-Beatles-book" book. If, however, you are a true Beatles nut, I don't think you'll find much new here.

I have a few little points. One: the first third of the book moves with glacier-like speed through the founding and launch of the band. Some will love this near-obsessive detail, other will find it too slow. I LOVED it. But by the final third of the book, things are moving in fifth gear, and the forward thrust leaves the late-period Beatles' cultural significance--amazingly--on the borders.

Second: Mr. Spitz is smug about how good his book is. Here's a few thoughts: while Mr. Spitz bashes Albert Goldman's biography of John Lennon, I have to say that I got a much better idea of who Lennon was from Mr. Goldman's effort than from that of Spitz. This is a little weird, because Mr. Spitz wrote his tome roughly two decades after Mr. Goldman (and therefore had about 20 extra years to find things out), and Mr. Spitz announces in his work that he worked partially from tape-recorded interviews that Mr. Goldman had made much earlier but mined only triflingly for his Lennon biography.

In sum, this is a solid, very well-researched effort, but one that lacks an overall harmony and that will have little new information for true Beatles junkies.

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The Beatles Rock History

Bob Spitz's biography of the Beatles is perhaps the finest, best researched, and most tantalizing analysis of how and why this group intersected with history in such a powerful way. Details are lavishly arranged to give the reader a sense of the sheer talent and blinding ambition that made the Beatles a cultural and musical phenomenon. Spitz does not sugar coat the one-tracked vision that guided the group's rise to fame. The Beatles had a killer instinct for success that was evident from their earliest days. They were also prodigious learners, intent upon absorbing the lessons from other stars about how to write hits and wind up an audience. Immensely entertaining and thought provoking, Spitz's biography places us in the center of the maelstrom called "Beatlemania" and also dissects the frenzy with the keen wit and observations of a talented social psychologist. Spectacular from start to finish. A meditation wrapped in electric sparks.

Donald Gallinger is the author of The Master Planets

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" Irresistible....A captivating picture that hasn't been seen before....THE BEATLES amplifies and corrects some of what is known about the band's formative years.... It powerfully evokes both the excitement and the price of such a sudden rise." --NEW YORK TIMES At last in paperback: the biography the Beatles deserve. It's all here, raw and right--the highs and the lows, the love and the rivalry, the awe and the jealousy, the drugs, the tears, the thrill, the magic never to be repeated--in a vast, exuberantly acclaimed book that's as brilliant and joyous and revelatory as a Beatles record itself.

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