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toniclark's review against another edition
5.0
Oh, just wonderful And the audio version is FANTASTIC!! “Though fifty years have passed since the breakup of the Beatles, the fab four continue to occupy an utterly unique place in popular culture. Their influence extends far beyond music and into realms as diverse as fashion and fine art, sexual politics and religion. 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.” [from the Amazon summary]
The Beatles’ music is the soundtrack of my life and it’s really hard to believe that 50 years have passed since they broke up. It’s easy to think we know all there is to know about them, but I learned a lot. In the end, my opinion of John changed quite a bit (for the worse) and I have a new appreciation for Ringo, who I found to be the most endearing. It’s impossible not to love Paul, right? And George? I’m still ambivalent.
The book was published in the UK with the title “One, Two, Three, Four: The Beatles in Time” (better title!). Do listen to the audio if you can. It’s a magnificent production.
The Beatles’ music is the soundtrack of my life and it’s really hard to believe that 50 years have passed since they broke up. It’s easy to think we know all there is to know about them, but I learned a lot. In the end, my opinion of John changed quite a bit (for the worse) and I have a new appreciation for Ringo, who I found to be the most endearing. It’s impossible not to love Paul, right? And George? I’m still ambivalent.
The book was published in the UK with the title “One, Two, Three, Four: The Beatles in Time” (better title!). Do listen to the audio if you can. It’s a magnificent production.
saroz162's review against another edition
3.0
It took me a long time to read this book - so long, in fact, I went back to the beginning and started it again, reading most of the first half twice. It has an interesting framework - 150 vignettes, many of which are very thinly connected, told in a roughly but not entirely chronological order - that contributes to it being both a little addictive and a little easy to forget once you put it down. It's a sort of attention-deficit writing; you can practically hear the "WHOOSH" from the TV series Lost as it veers backward, forward, and sideways in time.
It also takes some time to fully recognize what Brown's doing, or perhaps one might say the nature of his implicit thesis. This is a book about celebrity - about how it elevates normal, everyday people, changes how other people react to them, makes them into people they never would have been. Most of all, it's about the flame of celebrity and the peripheral figures who get their wings burnt by it. That's interesting - I'm not sure it's 650 pages of interesting, though.
Many of the vignettes revolve around specific people, and several of them will be familiar to stalwart fans, especially in the second half of the book: the Maharishi, "Magic" Alex, the policeman who broke up the rooftop concert, and of course, Yoko. The more surprising stories show up toward the beginning of the book, including anecdotes I've never read from Hamburg, encounters with Noel Coward and Malcolm Muggeridge, and some of the Beatles' earliest public appearances as chart-toppers. It's all very readable and often related in a cheerful, quirky tone that fits the cover design. The longer you go on, though, the more of a picture of destruction and chaos builds, including some openly seedy chapters that veer toward tabloid journalism (I'm thinking specifically of the second Ronnie Spector section). It's a strange book in that you often feel drawn to read it but feel just that little bit unclean afterward.
As others have also pointed out, Brown also gives the National Trust and their "preservation" of the Beatle homes a right kicking - not entirely unjustified, but the sarcasm in those chapters, and a couple others involving his tourist adventures, is laid on very thick.
At the end of the day I'm not totally sure what to make of One Two Three Four. It makes a worthwhile point, and I think it's good reading if you're a fan of the Beatles and you know a few (but not all) of these stories - you'll learn more about what happened to Jimmie Nicol, for instance. Some of the vignettes are really funny, like the letters received by Ringo from fangirls, and some of them are joyous, like the multiple perspectives that combine to tell the story of the Beatles on Ed Sullivan. The book ultimately trends toward melancholy, though - it's hard to get around the point he makes about Brian Epstein in the framing story, for instance - and while I'm in no way suggesting a book needs to stay cheerful and upbeat all the time, it feels like an awful lot of pages to reinforce a position that's pretty obvious by half the way through.
It also takes some time to fully recognize what Brown's doing, or perhaps one might say the nature of his implicit thesis. This is a book about celebrity - about how it elevates normal, everyday people, changes how other people react to them, makes them into people they never would have been. Most of all, it's about the flame of celebrity and the peripheral figures who get their wings burnt by it. That's interesting - I'm not sure it's 650 pages of interesting, though.
Many of the vignettes revolve around specific people, and several of them will be familiar to stalwart fans, especially in the second half of the book: the Maharishi, "Magic" Alex, the policeman who broke up the rooftop concert, and of course, Yoko. The more surprising stories show up toward the beginning of the book, including anecdotes I've never read from Hamburg, encounters with Noel Coward and Malcolm Muggeridge, and some of the Beatles' earliest public appearances as chart-toppers. It's all very readable and often related in a cheerful, quirky tone that fits the cover design. The longer you go on, though, the more of a picture of destruction and chaos builds, including some openly seedy chapters that veer toward tabloid journalism (I'm thinking specifically of the second Ronnie Spector section). It's a strange book in that you often feel drawn to read it but feel just that little bit unclean afterward.
As others have also pointed out, Brown also gives the National Trust and their "preservation" of the Beatle homes a right kicking - not entirely unjustified, but the sarcasm in those chapters, and a couple others involving his tourist adventures, is laid on very thick.
At the end of the day I'm not totally sure what to make of One Two Three Four. It makes a worthwhile point, and I think it's good reading if you're a fan of the Beatles and you know a few (but not all) of these stories - you'll learn more about what happened to Jimmie Nicol, for instance. Some of the vignettes are really funny, like the letters received by Ringo from fangirls, and some of them are joyous, like the multiple perspectives that combine to tell the story of the Beatles on Ed Sullivan. The book ultimately trends toward melancholy, though - it's hard to get around the point he makes about Brian Epstein in the framing story, for instance - and while I'm in no way suggesting a book needs to stay cheerful and upbeat all the time, it feels like an awful lot of pages to reinforce a position that's pretty obvious by half the way through.
siobhanreadssometimes's review against another edition
3.0
3.5 - I enjoyed most of this (very long, far too long) book
Best when entertainingly recalling tidbits and Beatles anecdotes, especially the effect they had on individuals who later became famous musicians, and how politicians (some more successful than others) attempted to leverage their image to support their agendas
Worst (and most off-putting) was the author’s snooty “above it all” attitude with a lot of the people he interviews (notable examples, his evisceration of Beatles tour experiences, his interview with a former Quarryman)
This was combined with his weird fixation on portraying Yoko Ono as the shadowy villain in every scenario (brushing over her miscarriage to emphasise her separation from her young daughter without context, harshly contrasting some of her more naive seeming hippy-ish statements about peace love & harmony to political events of the day, almost outright saying her work is derivative and trite bordering on plagiarised, and of course repeating the tired sexist narrative that she’s responsible for the Beatles’ break up)- not to mention his account of the last recording sessions of the Beatles are strikingly wrong after watching the Get Back documentary
One almost wonders if Yoko refused to contribute to the book and Craig is holding some type of weird grudge about it
Still if you want more of a straightforward history of the Beatles I recommend reading Hunter Davies’ book and the Get Back documentary first to get more of a comprehensive idea - then this to add a little flavour, a sense of their wider impact and some of the raunchier stuff Davies glosses over
Best when entertainingly recalling tidbits and Beatles anecdotes, especially the effect they had on individuals who later became famous musicians, and how politicians (some more successful than others) attempted to leverage their image to support their agendas
Worst (and most off-putting) was the author’s snooty “above it all” attitude with a lot of the people he interviews (notable examples, his evisceration of Beatles tour experiences, his interview with a former Quarryman)
This was combined with his weird fixation on portraying Yoko Ono as the shadowy villain in every scenario (brushing over her miscarriage to emphasise her separation from her young daughter without context, harshly contrasting some of her more naive seeming hippy-ish statements about peace love & harmony to political events of the day, almost outright saying her work is derivative and trite bordering on plagiarised, and of course repeating the tired sexist narrative that she’s responsible for the Beatles’ break up)- not to mention his account of the last recording sessions of the Beatles are strikingly wrong after watching the Get Back documentary
One almost wonders if Yoko refused to contribute to the book and Craig is holding some type of weird grudge about it
Still if you want more of a straightforward history of the Beatles I recommend reading Hunter Davies’ book and the Get Back documentary first to get more of a comprehensive idea - then this to add a little flavour, a sense of their wider impact and some of the raunchier stuff Davies glosses over
stephenrotzschthomas's review against another edition
funny
informative
lighthearted
medium-paced
5.0
achilles_heel's review against another edition
emotional
funny
informative
lighthearted
medium-paced
5.0
wendydt's review against another edition
5.0
I am not a Beatles fan and I don't own a single song but I loved this book. A bitter sweet insight into life in the sixties. I was particularly touched by the experiences of teenagers and other everyday people. The reading list at the end is breathtaking and I am very grateful that the author read them for me and pulled together this funny, sometimes sad book. A highlight for me has to be the table he put together of the incident where John assaults someone at a party. What else could demonstrate more the moving target of truth and the trials of a biographer.