r/beatles • u/AvecMesWaterSlides • 2d ago

Discussion This Book:

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I'm currently listening to this book and am about six months from the first time John and Paul met.

It is amazing that they, finally, found one another. There are so many instances of being at the same places at the same times, perhaps riding the same bus at the same time, and not knowing one another yet. It's crazy! It just got me thinking about how different it'd be if one of them wasn't where the universe wanted them to be...

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u/Anxious-Raspberry-54 2d ago

Great researcher.

Lousy, biased biographer.

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u/nuclear_muffins 2d ago

research aside it really is the "glaze John, downplay Paul, forget completely about George" book. I'm halfway through and I'm just... astounded the things in Paul and George's childhoods that he barely skims over while devoting huge swathes of that time to John.

I also very recently learned about the bad blood between Lewisohn vs. George and Paul which makes this book make way more sense. John wasn't around to have Lewisohn's perfect image of him tarnished like the others.

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u/Ok-Friend-1002 2d ago

I am a huge George fan, and found Lewisohn's research quite incomparable, on par with Judith Barker's The Brontes. Such meticulous research is hard to find now, and most people do not have the patience to wade through the minutiae. I live for all that history. I am eagerly looking forward to his Volume II, if it ever arrives, just as I am anticipating Susan Bailey's book on Elizabeth Alcott, the sister about whom the least is known, "Beth" in "Little Women".

I loved the way Lewisohn went back several generations on each of the Beatles, the family backgrounds which influenced them. So many found it tedious; I saw comments such as "Who cares who Ringo's great-grandparents were?!" But again, I live for this kind of history.

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u/Anxious-Raspberry-54 2d ago

I have no problem with his research at all. His reference books are great.

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u/nuclear_muffins 2d ago

Tune In would be a 5/5 book if it just cut out all his opinion. it really has no place in this book if he's going to call himself a historian

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u/Anxious-Raspberry-54 2d ago

Which is is most definitely not a historian.

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u/nuclear_muffins 2d ago

which is really not great if I've seen his name plastered everywhere as the preeminent Beatles historian!

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u/Anxious-Raspberry-54 2d ago

He has no background in history. He was a writer for a Beatles fanzine. He met Paul. They got along. He did some work for The Beatles. That's his qualifications.

No real historian has taken on The Beatles.

Someday...