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Copy/paste the text below into your blog. <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35539.The_Beatles_The_Biography?utm_medium=api&amp;utm_source=blog_review" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img alt="The Beatles: The Biography" border="0" src="http://s3.amazonaws.com/photo.goodreads.com/books/1168607729m/35539.jpg" /></a> <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35539.The_Beatles_The_Biography?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">The Beatles: The Biography</a> by <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/20125.Bob_Spitz">Bob Spitz</a><br/><br/> <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/17427236?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review"><h3>My review</h3></a> rating: 5 of 5 stars<br/>2007 marked a full fifty years since the formation of the Quarry Men -- the scruffy teenage Liverpool skiffle group who eventually became the Beatles -- but Bob Spitz' mammoth biography of the Fab Four goes even farther back than that. It starts with a brief history of the region itself followed by histories of the lads' families and hence spends some pages before getting into the story of the Beatles' meteoric rise. Luckily there is still almost a thousand of pages' worth of space thereafter to expound upon nearly every facet of the Beatles' lives and extraordinary careers, in an almost overwhelming but even-handed treatment that will ensure that even reasonably well-read Beatles fans like myself come away with a headful of new details, many taken from well-chosen interviews both fresh and obscure. The Beatles changed things so much, from their reinvention of pop music to their influence on popular culture and attitude itself, that it's the counter-intuitive things that stand out the most, such as how it took surprisingly long for their flame to catch a spark in America, and about how once it did, the crushing popularity made them walled-in prisoners of their own fame. Don't read if you're unwilling to see the Beatles' warts and all, including not just sex and drugs but also STDs and addictions; still, if you're looking for the true story of the Beatles, this is the only possible place to turn. <br/><br/><a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/851534?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">View all my reviews.</a>