Dreaming the Beatles: The Love Story of One Band and the Whole World

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About Dreaming The Beatles: The Love Story Of One Band

Product Description 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. Review “Filled with sharp criticism that challenges conventional wisdom. Once you know the history by heart, this is the place to understand what the Beatles mean now.” -- Pitchfork “This is the best book about the Beatles ever written…passionate and eloquent…If aliens land tomorrow, and demand to know why we keep on pumping this particular brand of music into space, this is the first book you would hand them.” -- Mashable “You’ll have a fantastic, joyous time reading  Dreaming the Beatles from cover to cover.” -- USA Today “[B]efore I began writing this I paged through Ian MacDonald’s canonical  Revolution in the Head and Devin McKinney’s renowned  The Beatles in Dream and History...But neither has a chance of topping Rob Sheffield’s  Dreaming the Beatles.” -- Robert Christgau, Village Voice “ Dreaming the Beatles is the individual exploration of a universal pop experience—listening to the Beatles, thinking about the Beatles, reinventing the Beatles in your mind, listening to them again...explaining your own life through the only four people who will always belong to everyone.” -- Chuck Klosterman, author of the New York Times bestseller But What If We’re Wrong “Usually hilarious, always surprising.” -- Griel Marcus, author of Mystery Train “The essential joy of  Dreaming the Beatles are these connections made between historical events, mythological band history, and the song itself—it’s sparkling, insightful, occasionally humorous writing unclouded by irony or cynicism about a capital-G Great Band.” -- Spin “Rob Sheffield’s unconventional rock-band bio is must-read material.” -- Forth Worth Star Telegram “As he’s proven in, well, all of his books, Sheffield writes about fandom, about the condition of loving a thing, as well or better than anyone, which is no small thing for a critic as savvy as he is.” -- Austin American-Statesman “For Sheffield, a chronicler of pop culture whose work blends thoughtful criticism and unabashed fandom, the heart of the Beatles story is about relationships.” -- Boston Globe “Half a century after their apogee...is