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List Price: $27.50 | | Publisher: Harmony
Salesrank: 114401
Released: October 2, 2007 |
| Our Price: $11.75 |
| Used Price: $4.13 |
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| Media: Hardcover |
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Editorial Review:
Nearly twenty years in the making, Can’t Buy Me Love is a masterful work of group biography, cultural history, and musical criticism. That the Beatles were an unprecedented phenomenon is a given. In Can’t Buy Me Love, Jonathan Gould seeks to explain why, placing the Fab Four in the broad and tumultuous panorama of their time and place, rooting their story in the social context that girded both their rise and their demise.
Beginning with their adolescence in Liverpool, Gould describes the seminal influences––from Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry to The Goon Show and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland––that shaped the Beatles both as individuals and as a group. In addition to chronicling their growth as singers, songwriters, and instrumentalists, he highlights the advances in recording technology that made their sound both possible and unique, as well as the developments in television and radio that lent an explosive force to their popular success. With a musician’s ear, Gould sensitively evokes the timeless appeal of the Lennon-McCartney collaboration and their emergence as one of the most creative and significant songwriting teams in history. And he sheds new light on the significance of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band as rock’s first concept album, down to its memorable cover art.
Behind the scenes Gould explores the pivotal roles played by manager Brian Epstein and producer George Martin, credits the influence on the Beatles’ music of contemporaries like Bob Dylan, Brian Wilson, and Ravi Shankar, and traces the gradual escalation of the fractious internal rivalries that led to the group’s breakup after their final masterpiece, Abbey Road. Most significantly, by chronicling their revolutionary impact on popular culture during the 1960s, Can’t Buy Me Love illuminates the Beatles as a charismatic phenomenon of international proportions, whose anarchic energy and unexpected import was derived from the historic shifts in fortune that transformed the relationship between Britain and America in the decades after World War II.
From the Beats in America and the Angry Young Men in England to the shadow of the Profumo Affair and JFK’s assassination, Gould captures the pulse of a time that made the Beatles possible—and even necessary. As seen through the prism of the Beatles and their music, an entire generation’s experience comes astonishingly to life. Beautifully written, consistently insightful, and utterly original, Can’t Buy Me Love is a landmark work about the Beatles, Britain, and America.
Can't Buy Me Love: The Beatles, Britain, and America Reviews:
CAN'T BUY ME LOVE by Jonathan Gould 
2008-10-28 -
I am currently still in the middle of this book. I think it is well written and presented. It is very familiar to me being a huge fan of the Beatles! A wonderful read for all ages! FANTASTIC!
SW
The Best Book on the Beatles
2008-09-01 - Gould's book sets a new standard for serious works on the Beatles. It is meticulously researched and documented, well-structured, and written with admirable clarity combined with the author's enjoyment of his subject. This is the most ambitious book about the Beatles and their cultural and historical context, and its success is attributable to Gould's determination, thoroughness, mature perspective, and accessible writing style. But perhaps I am biased. Darn it, this is the book that I have been meaning to write for the last 38 years.
Pretty Good 
2008-07-15 - The sentence structure is great and the narrative seamlessly flows. However, he is a music historian and hence goes into long detours when applying context. I would have greatly preferred if he had spent less time on these subjects and more on the actual Beatles themselves. A paragraph would suffice but I find myself skipping several pages. When I skip pages and scan for Beatles or Jon or McCartney, etc. I don't see anything on the Beatles for pages. I know that these long passages are unneeded because even after skipping pages I still understand the context just fine.
Nonetheless, I still give it four stars because it ignores rumors, is rich with language, fills the holes of knowledge that I did not know as someone who grew up in the nineties, and the in depth analysis of songs. A glossary with vocabulary words would be great because he is a musician and as such thinks that all these words are common knowledge.
Required Reading
2008-07-12 - I found this book completely satisfying and facinating from an historical as well as musical standpoint. Gould has taken the Beatles as a musical and cultural force and woven the last 60 years around them to create a complete understanding of the group's impact on 20th-21st century culture and music. This is one of the top 10 must reads for any serious scholar of the Beatles and it's a great read for people who just want to be well informed fans. He also manages to write in an interesting way that keeps you turning pages. One of the best books ever written about the fabs and well worth the 20 odd years he spent researching. A winner all the way.
An Historical Musical Tour
2008-07-01 - So much more than a 'fan' book, Jonathan Gould's Can't Buy Me Love (2007) is an astute blending of personal, historical, cultural and musical interpretation. It follows the "Fab Four" from their very earliest days, without undue emphasis on extraneous details of their childhood, up through their coming together as The Bealtes, and then follows their career up to the end of their life together as Beatles . What really strikes me about this book is the amount of insightful commentary on the making of the music, the meaning of lyrics and the context in which each of the albums was put together. Gould is not afraid to criticize certain of thre Beatles compositions or projects; neither is he trying to 'demyth' the Bealtes. This is perhaps the most balanced, engaging account of the Bealtes, their impact, their foibles and their successes I have ever read.
I consider myself fairly knowledgeable about the Beatles; I have listened to them since I was five years old--yet I learned a great deal about them in this excellent book!
