About this title: Bob Spitz's lengthy biography of the Beatles minutely examines their formative years, both as individuals in Liverpool and later as a band let loose in the fleshpots and dives of Hamburg. Spitz scrutinizes the complex motives of their manager, Brian Epstein, as well as outlining John, Paul, George, and Ringo's often cutthroat ambition and seemingly boundless energy, which was often enhanced by liberal quantities of amphetamines. He also impeccably renders the band's musical apprenticeship and their growing songwriting confidence, not neglecting to dissect the less savory aspects of their ...
read more
Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Back Bay Books
Date Published: 2006-10-10
ISBN-13:9780316013314ISBN:0316013315
Description: Very Good. Softcover in very good condition, minor shelf wear to cover only, no writing, non-smoking home, binding tight, Christian business. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Date Published: 2005-11-01
ISBN-13:9780316803526ISBN:0316803529
Description: Like New. Very Good w/Remainder Mark. Even before the Beatles hit the big time, a myth was created. This version of the Beatles legend smoothed the rough edges and filled in the fault lines, and for more than forty years this manicured version of the Beatles story has sustained as truth — until now. The product of almost a decade of research, hundreds of unprecedented interviews, and the discovery of scores of never-before-revealed documents, Bob Spitz's The Beatles is the biography fans have ... read more
Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: Little Brown and Company
Date Published: 2005
ISBN-13:9780739469668ISBN:0739469665
Description: Very good. No dust jacket as issued. Good used copy; cover shows slight shelf wear; binding unbent and pages clean. Sewn binding. Cloth over boards. With dust jacket. 983 p. Contains: Illustrations. Audience: General/trade. read more
Edition: 1st
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Little Brown & Co, Many
Date Published: 2005
ISBN-13:9780316803526ISBN:0316803529
Description: Illustrated. Fine in Fine jacket. Hard Back. 8vo-over 7¾"-9¾" tall. The hard cover and the jacket has very little shelf wear...THE PRICE INCLUDES ADDITIONAL S&H IN THE U. S. ONLY.....................We are very careful when we list our books, but sometimes something minor may get by. read more
Edition: First Edition ARC
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Date Published: 2005-11-01
ISBN-13:9780316803526ISBN:0316803529
Description: Good. PAPERBACK ADVANCE COPY (ARC/GALLEY/PROOF). Corners have some wear but aren't wildly dog eared. Dust smudges on edges of text block. Spine uncreased. A good "good" copy. read more
Edition: Illustrated. Annotated.
Binding: Trade paperback
Publisher: Little Brown
Date Published: 2005
ISBN-13:9780316013314ISBN:0316013315
Description: Very good. No dust jacket as issued. Remains of price sticker on upper right corner of front cover; some shelf wear. No crease on spine. Tight binding. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. 983 p. Contains: Illustrations. Audience: General/trade. read more
Description: Little, Brown, 2005. 983 pages. 1st printing / edition. Hardcover. Photos, notes, bibliography, index. Near Fine-in Fine dustjacket. Cover has a couple small stains, initials and date inside cover and the blank side of the front endpaper. Bright, solid and square. In protective mylar. ISBN: 0316803529 Massive volume by the author of Barefoot in Babylon and a biography of Bob Dylan. read more
Edition: First Edition, First Printing
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Date Published: 2005-11-01
ISBN-13:9780316803526ISBN:0316803529
Description: Very Good in Very Good jacket. First Printing. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Back Bay Books
Date Published: 2006
ISBN-13:9780316013314ISBN:0316013315
Description: New. Brand New! Buy with confidence-your satisfaction is guaranteed at B-Logistics! Due to the large scale of our operation, we do not have access to the specific contents/condition of our items. Please note that Expedited shipping is not available at this time. read more
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: Back Bay Books
Date Published: 2006-10-10
ISBN-13:9780316013314ISBN:0316013315
Description: NEW. Softcover. From an inventory that is 100% brand-new, 100% direct from the publishers' distribution channel. We carry NO pre-owned, NO remaindered. We pack in CARDBOARD to ensure the pristine quality is maintained. (Bubble-wrap alone is NOT sufficient to protect from USPS equipment. ) Guaranteed brand-NEW, protected with CARDBOARD, your satisfaction is guaranteed. BKLUVID: 9780316013314. read more
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: Little, Brown & Co., Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A.
Date Published: 2005
ISBN-13:9780739469668ISBN:0739469665
Description: Very Good with no dust jacket. 9780739469668. Thick softbound, light wear/soil, crease starting at spine, pgs clean/white; 12mo-over 6¾"-7¾" tall. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Little, Brown & Company 2005
Date Published: 2005
ISBN-13:9780316803526ISBN:0316803529
Description: ISBN 0316803529. Hardback. First Printing. Very Good to Near Fine condition book in a Very Good to Near Fine condition dustjacket, with slight shelfwear on cover and jacket edges. Tight, bright, attractive copy with no markings to the book except for black remainder slash on bottom edge of book near spine. $29.95 original price is present and unclipped on front flap of dustjacket. Copy 1. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Little, Brown & Company 2005
Date Published: 2005
ISBN-13:9780316803526ISBN:0316803529
Description: ISBN 0316803529. Hardback. First Printing. Very Good to Near Fine condition book in a Very Good to Near Fine condition dustjacket, with slight shelfwear on cover and jacket edges. Tight, bright, attractive copy with no markings to the book except for black remainder slash on bottom edge of book near spine. $29.95 original price is present and unclipped on front flap of dustjacket. Copy 2. read more
Edition: First Edition
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Little, Brown & Co, N.Y.
Date Published: 2005
ISBN-13:9780316803526ISBN:0316803529
Description: Fine in Fine jacket. 8vo-over 7¾"-9¾" tall. Black boards, pictorial d.j. 983 pages. Biography of the Beatles, from Penny Lane to Strawberry Fields. Amid squalor and violence and the pep pills. read more
Description: Acceptable. No dust jacket. Book is ACCEPTABLE with noted wear to cover and pages. Binding intact. May contain highlighting, inscriptions or notations. We offer a no-hassle guarantee on all our items. Orders generally ship by the next business day. Default Text. read more
"Well, I only read the last half, to see what jolly Bob Spitz could do with the tale of hippy woe which is the decline & fall of the four jolly boys. I was expecting a whole lot of fun to be had in the style of Bob's outrageous biography of the other Bob, Dylan. In that one, Spitz makes up whole conversations, assumes things when he hasn't got any facts or sources, jumps into Dylan's head to riff on what he "probably" would have been thinking, kicks him when he's down, and all in all has a right good laugh. But in this Beatles tome disappointingly he plays it completely straight. So it comes off as pretty good, pretty comprehensive, nothing that you didn't already know but you can probably give half of your other Beatles books to Oxfam now because it's all in here."
"John has been singing daily along with his friends on the top of a hill in Liverpool, gotten an harmonica which he plays on his bike, and is close to buying a guitar. He's not interested in school and making crude cartoons in class. He has not met Paul yet, but Bob Spitz is building up to it and I can't wait.
5/24 Paul just wrote "yesterday".
When 9, Stuart started listening to the Beatles--every single day in the car, in went the tape. We eventually got all the Beatles, and I discovered with him the early Beatles. (I was 13 when "Abbey Road" came out, and know every bit of it--although not the lyrics which I could not understand. So it's more an organic than an intellectual knowledge, maybe like a baby grasping the world minus the words). The early Beatles are now associated with our drives to SSI and the sweet moments I shared with Stuart. It was awesome how some specific sound would move me to the core, and transform I 16/95 into a huge "sky meets earth" landscape with sun and clouds playing their sharp contrast off each other. Reading their biography, I'm amazed at how I can hear the songs from those trips, including the "come on", "yeah" or "wooooo". The difference is that now I can hear the fans' hysteric screams as well--and visualize the Beatles grinning as they got to a "woooo", shaking their long hair and sending the crowd into ecstasy.
Anyway, "Yesterday" is an event in the book as to the way Paul came to create it, and how it became the "most recorded song of all times." (p. 559). I had no clue, and it's nice I could enjoy it just because it's so beautiful.
6/29 Finished the 863 pages, and leaving tomorrow for France. Just in time. Well deserving 5 stars, but what a disturbing book. As mentioned before, I loved "Abbey Road" growing up, yet I had no clue of the climate of despair that surrounded its production. How could broken-up people and relationships produce such beautiful music? John's (and Brian's) fall into drugs is painful. It seems almost unavoidable in John's case: so much talent and so much anger. No question Paul and John were geniuses AND very hard-working people. But interesting how genius can be developed: George eventually starts to write songs, like "Something" and "Here comes the sun" in Abbey Road which I loved maybe more than the rest. The softness of it seems to infiltrate you in a deeper way than the slamming power of other songs. John assassinated in 1980, the year Dick and I married, I remember it and can't believe it was so long ago. To Stuart, John is that old dud who lived sometimes in the indefinite past. George stabbed in 1999 (and died of cancer 2 years later for all the cigs he smoked). I was also surprised to discover how self-serving Yoko Ono's art was, and how she brought John down to her level. So genius is indeed flexible: some wiring-up, hard work, and right surrounding (well, not in Michelangelo's case--work was all he needed--Oh! I discovered the Louvre has his "Slaves" sculptures, and I can't wait to see them!). The book stops when the Beatles separate, but still, there was John's "Imagine" (last?) spark. "Imagine aaaall the peopleeee, liiving for today-ay-ay-ay-ay.""
"Enlightening and fascinating, and matches my memories--from the extreme edge, of course. (The closest touch being when I was invited to spend a weekend at Ascot Park, spring of '72, but I chickened out. Not by the Beatles, but by a photographer associated with them. Oh, and the summer of '63, when I was a little kid, I wrote parodies of two of their songs to perform at summer camp, but as soon as I and my three girl partners strummed the first chord, the entire camp erupted in screams, and wouldn't stop for the entire song.)"
"This is an excruciatingly poorly written book that still manages to tell a great story. Tiresomely exhaustive near the beginning, it forces you to wade through much flowery language and such unnecessary flourishes as tracing John and Paul's respective ancestry back to Ireland and a discourse on the Liverpool shipping industry; given how much of it is filler, it's unconscionable that the book runs nearly 900 pages. Quotations are unforgivably mangled, with far too much fussily inserted in brackets or (sic)'d; numerous quotations are plunked into the text totally without attribution. A former music manager, Spitz gets the music business abundantly well, which may be why the best drawn character by far is Brian Epstein (with the glaring exception of Epstein's homosexuality, with which Spitz evinces maximum discomfort, handling it as if with tongs). He does not, however, get music or musicians. Attempts at critical explication of the Beatles' catalogue are ham-handed at best and are noticeably less frequently attempted as the book wears on. Having met the boys as children, we never really get a picture of their adult personalities or what drove them as artists. In contrast to the detailed early picture, more and more is glossed over as the Beatles' lives and careers become more complex. It is as if Spitz were writing the book from beginning to end all at once and got more and more tired, until finally he couldn't go on, and the book ends before the release of Let It Be. Nonetheless, even in purely superficial chronicle, the story of the Beatles is a great and powerful one, and this fan, at least, put on Abbey Road and cried while reading the epilogue."
We guarantee every item's condition, as described on Alibris. If you are not satisfied that an item is as described, return your purchase for a refund.
rating
