If you read this book, a splendid time is guaranteed” - Frank Cottrell-Boyce, The Tablet Brown has as many ways to tell a story as the Beatles had to write a song. The most engaging, most surprising, most thought-provoking and purely enjoyable book I’ve read in ages. , by putting the Beatles in their place as well as their time, is by far the best book anyone has written about them and the closest we can get to the truth." -Dominic Green, Literary Review The exceptional strangeness of the Beatles reflects the ordinary oddity of real life. "A brilliantly executed study of cultural time, social space and the madness of fame.
(Ringo Starr-‘the contrarian position,’ she says.)" -Joumana Khatib, The New York Times This is the biography for anyone who’s wondered which Beatle Fran Lebowitz liked best. “The author of the highly entertaining Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret (the princess makes an appearance in these pages, too) eschews a linear narrative in favor of correspondence, imagined outcomes that never came to pass and cascades of interviews to convey the singular cultural importance of the Beatles. "The perfect antidote to these times." -Julian Barnes, The Guardian I loved every word of it." - Dominic Sandbrook, The Sunday Times is such an infectiously jolly writer that you don’t even need to like the Beatles to enjoy his book. a fascinating study of the cultural and social upheaval created by the band." - Moira Hodgson, The Wall Street Journal Along the way he unearths many fascinating tidbits. "Brown, a perceptive writer and a gifted satirist, makes familiar stories fresh. Brown’s book is an idiosyncratic cocktail of oral history, personal memoir, tourism and biography." - Charles Arrowsmith, The Washington Post His biographical method-combining fragments, lists, excerpts, quotes and flights of whimsy-is executed as brilliantly here as in 2017’s glittering Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret. “Time-play and what-ifs are part of Brown’s formidable bag of tricks, deployed to add emotional range and a poignant twist to his comic vignettes. Named a Best Book of 2020 by The Economist, The Evening Standard, The Guardian, The Paris Review, The Spectator, The Telegraph, TIME and The Times (UK) Part anthropology and part memoir, and enriched by the recollections of everyone from Tom Hanks to Bruce Springsteen, this book is a humorous, elegiac, and at times madcap take on the Beatles’ role in the making of the sixties and of music as we know it. Or what about the Baptist preacher who claimed that the Beatles synchronized their songs with the rhythm of an infant’s heartbeat so as to induce a hypnotic state in listeners? And just how many people have employed the services of a Canadian dentist who bought John Lennon’s tooth at auction, extracted its DNA, and now offers paternity tests to those hoping to sue his estate?ġ50 Glimpses of the Beatles is, above all, a distinctively kaleidoscopic examination of the Beatles’ effect on the world around them and the world they helped bring into being.
One journalist, mistaken for Paul McCartney as he trailed the band in his car, found himself nearly crushed to death as fans climbed atop the vehicle and pressed their bodies against the windshield. When actress Eleanor Bron touched down at Heathrow with the Beatles, she thought that a flock of starlings had alighted on the roof of the terminal-only to discover that the birds were in fact young women screaming at the top of their lungs. Who better, then, to capture the Beatles phenomenon than Craig Brown-the inimitable author of Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret and master chronicler of the foibles and foppishness of British high society? This wide-ranging portrait of the four lads from Liverpool rivals the unique spectacle of the band itself by delving into a vast catalog of heretofore unexamined lore. When they appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1964, fresh off the plane from England, they provoked an epidemic of hoarse-throated fandom that continues to this day.
Their influence extends far beyond music and into realms as diverse as fashion and fine art, sexual politics and religion. Though fifty years have passed since the breakup of the Beatles, the Fab Four continue to occupy an utterly unique place in popular culture. "If you want to know what it was like to live those extraordinary Beatles years in real time, read this book.” -Alan Johnson, The Spectator Winner of the 2020 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non- FictionĪ distinctive portrait of the Fab Four by one of the sharpest and wittiest writers of our time
0 kommentar(er)
