Imagine This

Imagine This
Author: Julia Baird
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Total Pages: 492
Release: 2011-03-31
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1848946511

'Honest and poignant' THE SUN The honest and revealing story of John Lennon's childhood by his sister Julia. Through her own personal journey, Julia reveals the battle between two strong, self-willed women - John's mother and his Aunt Mimi - to have custody of John in his early years. It was Aunt Mimi who finally won and removed John from his mother at the age of five. But as John grew up, he would frequently return home - spending time with his mother and half-sisters, Julia, Jackie and Ingrid, learning his love of music from his mother, and hanging out, playing guitar with his childhood friend Paul McCartney. Julia is candid about the sadness as well as the joy of their broken family life. She details the devestating loss of their mother Julia in a road accident - and describes the painful legacy for the entire family, especially John as he moves into a life of stratospheric fame with the Beatles.

Fab Four Friends

Fab Four Friends
Author: Susanna Reich
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 42
Release: 2015-08-18
Genre: Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN: 080509458X

Combines lyrical prose and illustrations in an introduction to The Beatles, history's best-selling band, that details their ordinary childhoods and musical inspirations amid a backdrop of postwar England.

My Ticket to Ride

My Ticket to Ride
Author: Janice Mitchell
Publisher: Gray & Company, Publishers
Total Pages: 279
Release: 2021-09-15
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1598511173

A true-adventure, coming-of-age tale set in the exhilarating first wave of Beatlemania … It’s 1964, and 16-year-old Janice is struggling in a grim foster home in Cleveland when she falls suddenly, deeply in love … with the Beatles. They and their music stir in her an ecstatic new sense of freedom. With a friend, she hatches a bold plan to escape their dreary lives and run away to London to meet the Fab Four. On their own for the first time—in “Beatleland”—they explore a new city, a new culture, and a new life, visiting the hippest clubs of Soho, meeting some nice English boys, hitchhiking to Liverpool … But unbeknownst to them, the runaways have become international news—and a hunt is on. Adventure and newfound freedom end abruptly when Janice is apprehended by London police and hauled home to Cleveland and an unforgiving juvenile justice system. Warned by responsible adults to put it all behind her, she doesn’t speak of her extraordinary adventure for more than fifty years. In this memoir, she looks back with fresh insight on the heady early days of Beatlemania and an era in America when young women exercising some control over their lives presented a serious threat to adult society.

Dreaming the Beatles

Dreaming the Beatles
Author: Rob Sheffield
Publisher: HarperCollins
Total Pages: 339
Release: 2017-04-25
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0062207679

An NPR Best Book of the Year • Winner of the Virgil Thomson Award for Outstanding Music Criticism “This is the best book about the Beatles ever written” —Mashable Rob Sheffield, the Rolling Stone columnist and bestselling author of Love Is a Mix Tape offers an entertaining, unconventional look at the most popular band in history, the Beatles, exploring what they mean today and why they still matter so intensely to a generation that has never known a world without them. Dreaming the Beatles is not another biography of the Beatles, or a song-by-song analysis of the best of John and Paul. It isn’t another exposé about how they broke up. It isn’t a history of their gigs or their gear. It is a collection of essays telling the story of what this ubiquitous band means to a generation who grew up with the Beatles music on their parents’ stereos and their faces on T-shirts. What do the Beatles mean today? Why are they more famous and beloved now than ever? And why do they still matter so much to us, nearly fifty years after they broke up? As he did in his previous books, Love is a Mix Tape, Talking to Girls About Duran Duran, and Turn Around Bright Eyes, Sheffield focuses on the emotional connections we make to music. This time, he focuses on the biggest pop culture phenomenon of all time—The Beatles. In his singular voice, he explores what the Beatles mean today, to fans who have learned to love them on their own terms and not just for the sake of nostalgia. Dreaming the Beatles tells the story of how four lads from Liverpool became the world’s biggest pop group, then broke up—but then somehow just kept getting bigger. At this point, their music doesn’t belong to the past—it belongs to right now. This book is a celebration of that music, showing why the Beatles remain the world’s favorite thing—and how they invented the future we’re all living in today.

Why Is Everybody Yelling?

Why Is Everybody Yelling?
Author: Marisabina Russo
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2021-10-26
Genre: Young Adult Nonfiction
ISBN: 0374390665

“A wonderful book about figuring out who we are and who we want to be when we grow up. It’s also about being an American—especially a first-generation American.” —Roz Chast This graphic-novel debut from an acclaimed picture book creator is a powerfully moving memoir of the author's experiences with family, religion, and coming of age in the aftermath of World War II, and the childhood struggles and family secrets that shaped her. It’s 1950s New York, and Marisabina Russo is being raised Catholic and attending a Catholic school that she loves—but when she finds out that she’s Jewish by blood, and that her family members are Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, her childhood is thrown into turmoil. To make matters more complicated, her father is out of the picture, her mother is ambitious and demanding, and her older half-brothers have troubles, too. Following the author’s young life into the tumultuous, liberating 1960s, this heartfelt, unexpectedly humorous, and meticulously illustrated graphic-novel memoir explores the childhood burdens of memory and guilt, and Marisabina’s struggle and success in forming an identity entirely her own.

Beatleness

Beatleness
Author: Candy Leonard
Publisher: Skyhorse
Total Pages: 425
Release: 2016-07-05
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1628727691

“A must-have for Beatles fans looking for new insight . . . Leonard uncovers fresh ideas [that] . . . six decades of Beatles literature passed over." —The Spectrum Part generational memoir and part cultural history of the sixties, Beatleness is the first book to tell the story of the Beatles and their impact on America from the fans’ perspective. When the Beatles arrived in the United States on February 7, 1964, they immediately became a constant, compelling presence in fans’ lives. For the next six years, the band presented a nonstop deluge of steadily evolving sounds, ideas, and images that transformed the childhood and adolescence of millions of baby boomers and nurtured a relationship unique in history. Exploring that relationship against the backdrop of the sexual revolution, political assassinations, the Vietnam War, and other events, Beatleness examines critically the often-heard assertion that the Beatles “changed everything” and shows how—through the interplay between the group, the fans, and the culture—that change came about. Beatleness incorporates hundreds of hours of in-depth fan interviews and includes many fan vignettes. Offering a fresh perspective and new insights on the Beatles phenomenon, it allows readers to experience—or re-experience—what it was like to be a young person during those transformative years.

Two of Us

Two of Us
Author: Peter Smith
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Total Pages: 206
Release: 2004
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780618251452

The author of A Good Family offers poignant, entertaining account of how his and his son's mutual love for the music of the Beatles sparked a closer relationship, describing how they used the songs and exploits of the Fab Four to spark discussions of such topics as friendship, teamwork, art, sorrow, failure, and mortalitiy.

Here, There and Everywhere

Here, There and Everywhere
Author: Geoff Emerick
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 658
Release: 2006-03-16
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 110121824X

An all-access, firsthand account of the life and music of one of history's most beloved bands--from an original mastering engineer at Abbey Road Geoff Emerick became an assistant engineer at the legendary Abbey Road Studios in 1962 at age fifteen, and was present as a new band called the Beatles recorded their first songs. He later worked with the Beatles as they recorded their singles “She Loves You” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” the songs that would propel them to international superstardom. In 1964 he would witness the transformation of this young and playful group from Liverpool into professional, polished musicians as they put to tape classic songs such as “Eight Days A Week” and “I Feel Fine.” Then, in 1966, at age nineteen, Geoff Emerick became the Beatles’ chief engineer, the man responsible for their distinctive sound as they recorded the classic album Revolver, in which they pioneered innovative recording techniques that changed the course of rock history. Emerick would also engineer the monumental Sgt. Pepper and Abbey Road albums, considered by many the greatest rock recordings of all time. In Here, There and Everywhere he reveals the creative process of the band in the studio, and describes how he achieved the sounds on their most famous songs. Emerick also brings to light the personal dynamics of the band, from the relentless (and increasingly mean-spirited) competition between Lennon and McCartney to the infighting and frustration that eventually brought a bitter end to the greatest rock band the world has ever known.