Kindle version just 99p today, on amazon.
Craig Brown – 1234 bargain
Comments
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Musings on the byways of popular culture
Musings on the byways of popular culture
Kindle version just 99p today, on amazon.
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Thank you! Immediately ordered
Cheers!
Read this earlier in the year. It was the most enjoyable Beatles book I have read in years. It’s like someone collated all of the interesting bits from all the other Beatle books.
Thanks so much for the heads-up!
Snapped it up, cheers for the tip. I’ve heard nothing but praise for this book.
Tempted, but I think I really have read too many books about The Beatles.
99p and you can’t move past tempted?
You’ll be giving yourself a good hard kicking at one minute past midnight…
Well I thought of buying it (if I can in Canada), but I seriously doubt I will ever read it. I am Beatled out (until next Lewisohn volume anyway).
It is very good – as Podicle says, it is like someone collated the most interesting bits from other Beatles books. But as he does this, you also see how the Beatles had an impact on so many lives, and as he is not writing one straightforward narrative but using so many sources, you see them in many ways.
I think he must be one of the most inventive writers around, as well as a great parodist, and is more interesting than any serious British novelist I can think of. Another book of his I liked was One on One where he takes an encounter between two people then follows it with the second person meeting someone else and so on. So it starts with Hitler being knocked down by John Scott-Ellis, who in the next section meets Rudyard Kipling, who then talks to Mark Twain, who then meets Helen Keller… and so on until at the end Hitler reappears. It’s almost an alternative history of the century, with characters as varied as Rasputin and Simon Dee. And all of the encounters really took place.
I’d never actually heard of Craig Brown before now.
He’s worth looking into. He writes the Diary spoofs in Private Eye, and also a more general humorous column and book reviews in the Daily and Sunday Mail. He’s been around in various publications for some time, he’s about 60, but always keeps up with what’s going on.
His similarly constructed ‘biography’ of Princess Margaret, ‘Ma’am Darling’ is very entertaining.
Mrs Japanese bought me this for my birthday earlier in the year, and I am reading this at the moment. I’m currently half way through and can only echo the praise it’s received so far.
Great – thanks!
Have the hardback and a cheap kindle copy will compliment it nicely. Especially when I next travel ( HA !! ).
Thank you for the heads up.
I should point out, and it’s well documented elsewhere, that this book is littered with factual errors – among them, that Gene Vincent died in the 1960 car crash in Wiltshire that killed Eddie Cochran [he died from a ruptured stomach ulcer in California in 1971], and that British prime minister Harold Wilson was a “fellow Liverpudlian” [he was from Huddersfield, on the other side of the Pennines].