![]() It is as though the world has tacitly agreed that the big biographers weren't getting us anywhere, when we know all the facts and few new ones are emerging.īrown's method is such that, amid endless research, he doesn't have to do any of his own interviews, though he did roll up for a few magical mystery Beatles heritage tours to Liverpool and Hamburg, amusingly recounted here. The short form is Brown's strong suit so these post-biographies (or postcard biographies: chapters are divided into even smaller fragments) are mosaics, like a portrait made up of many photos, similar to Rob Sheffield's valuable recent contribution, Dreaming the Beatles. The Beatles merit an extra fifty-one glimpses there are four of them after all-but the book's British title lacks mention of the snapshot technique (emphasized in America, where the book is retitled 150 Glimpses of the Beatles). Perhaps those ninety-nine glimpses added up to a hundredth that summed up Margaret perfectly.īrown-who has always enjoyed poking fun at popular culture in his Private Eye diaries-is most comfortable with the "private" writings, the journals and letters of his victims and heroes, and these have been the primary source material for his three more ambitious recent volumes, which also include One on One, an ingeniously constructed chain of celebrity meetings (some so unlikely as to seem like parody), and now One Two Three Four, which gives the Beatles the royal treatment. The portrait was sympathetic yet unsparing, and even as the book distanced itself from the competition with some modest existential self-analysis, it swelled the canon. Its marriage of tired subject and novel approach-deftly juxtaposed "glimpses" made up of facts, news items, existing eyewitness accounts, pastiche and flights of fancy, all in correct chronology-caused some to wonder whether Brown had reinvented biography entirely and others to marvel that there was finally a royal biography of any description they could stomach between seasons of The Crown. ![]() ĬRAIG BROWN'S KALEIDOSCOPIC meditation Ma'am Darling: 99 glimpses of Princess Margaret won praise and prizes. 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.656pp. 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? 150 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. 150 Glimpses of the Beatles - Los Angeles Public Library - OverDrive A distinctive portrait of the Fab Four by one of the sharpest and wittiest writers of our time.'If you want to know what it was like to live those extraordinary Beatles years in real time, read this book. 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.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 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. 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. A distinctive portrait of the Fab Four by one of the sharpest and wittiest writers of our time
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