Beatles Book:

		List Price: $15.95		Publisher: Three Rivers Press Salesrank: 29060 Released: November 4, 2008
		Our Price: $4.99
		Used Price: $4.98
		Media: Paperback

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.


From the Hardcover edition.

Can't Buy Me Love: The Beatles, Britain, and America Reviews:
Pompous
2009-09-23 - This is just so pompous. The author is described as a musician. But in one place he describes drums as 'thunderous'. I've played in several bands and done plenty of studio work and I've never heard a musician talk that way.

In other places, describing a Beatles song, he'll say something like 'the Beatles are telling us'. The use of the present tense to refer to the past is one of these horrible conceits that literary critics use ('Shakespeare is saying', 'Joyce is reminding us'). It's unbearingly pretentious. The Beatles would have hated it.

If you want to read something meaningful, read Geoff Emerick's book. If you want to learn about their music, read 'The Beatles As Musicians'.

Good but a lot of information
2009-09-01 - I thought the book was researched and written well. I really wanted to read this book but found myself glossing over sections that didn;t related directly to the Beatles. All in all I am happy I read this book but slightly guilty I didn't read the entire book.

A Great Book!
2009-07-12 - I grew up during the Beatle era and it wasn't uncommon for my parents or the 17 year old kid next door to be humming their tunes. Later on in high school I had friends who were Beatles fans. They always had the Beatles 8-Track going in their cars. But, while I grew up listening to the Beatles, I was never a big fan. I think it was just over exposure. To me, analyzing thei music was like analyzing "Happy Birthday."

Once the group broke up in the late 1960s, it seemed like the only people who really "understood" the Beatles were these aging hippies who couldn't move on. According to them, unless you knew the secret messages or codes within the Beatles' songs, you were never going to understand what they were trying to say. I picked Jonathan Gould's book up off the table in the BU Bookstore last spring on a whim.

Boy, Jonathan Gould's book is so good. His book is a well-researched history of this remarkable group with his expert comments on every album and every song. He addresses all of the myths regarding the Beatles and sets the reader straight. I no longer feel out of the loop. In fact, there wasn't much of a loop after all. Gould's narrative allows the readers to met the Beatles on their own terms. The Beatles were gifted musicians and song-writers, but hardly the gods that many of their fans believed. The book moves along quickly and never, ever bogs down. I can't even pick a favorite chapter; they were all so good.

The great thing about this book is that Gould shows and doesn't tell. He begins the book by re-creating the scenario in Liverpool at the time when the Beatles were beginning. He expert handling of the society, the culture, and the music makes this book a great read. It's simply one of the best books I've ever read.

If you want to know what the world of popular culture looked like between 1950 and 1970, check this book out. You won't be disappointed.

Comprehensive - Almost to a Fault
2009-06-24 - Gould's book may be the most serious and detailed examination of the Beatle's phenomenon ever written. He does an exceedingly good job in writing about their music and their development as musicians and artists. He explores the sociological context of the 60's and his writing on this topic is often engaging making the pages fly by.

Some of his analysis does get to be a bit overblown and there are considerable passages where he seems to be stretching a bit to make some profound connection that in the end feels sketchy at best.

The role of Brian Epstein in the lives and trajectory of the Beatle's career as explained by Gould was a very interesting aspect of this book. It is clear that the death of their friend and manager left a huge gap affecting their artistic focus by forcing them to pay closer attention to their business interests and ultimately contributing significant tension to their personal interactions.

Overall despite the book's shortcomings I enjoyed reliving the Beatle's story and while I grew up a faithful follower of the band and their music I learned quite a bit from Gould particularly about the music itself.

Seriously?
2009-06-05 - I'm widely read in the matter of Beatle history, which is not to tout my own authority, but, rather, to assert that I'm more than a dabbler in the topic, and I have to say that this is EASILY the most wind-blown, over-blown, just plain blows writing I've ever come across on any topic. The excruciating passage passage on charisma, in which Gould invokes Freud and Weber, while worthy of modest consideration, does not merit the ten or so pages it receives given that he doesn't provide a scrap of evidence for his assertions other than the fact that he thinks it's so plainly so. In fact, there is no way to even verify the merits of his argument and his assertion that only in the light of this view is it possible to have a deeper understanding of the phenomenon of Beatlemania is patently self-aggrandizing.
While Gould's writing on the music itself is at times thrilling, it is likewise annoying in spots. The passage on "Norwegian Wood" was irritating in the extreme. Seriously - why do we need parallels drawn between Norwegian teak furniture and the teak used to make George's newest musical love, the sitar? Are we to believe that the Beatles gave ANY of this a second's thought? And, if not, how is it relevant?
Gould is an able writer, and by and large this book is a real contribution; I just don't see any evidence of his having employed any discrimination against his own estimations. At all. Ever.