“The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin”, by H. W. Brands

 

784 pages, Anchor, ISBN-13: 978-0385495400

While in Paris in 1780 (Midnight, October 22^nd, pour être exact), Benjamin Franklin wrote Dialogue Between Franklin and the Gout, in which the fictitious “Madame Gout” comes to call and, as she inflicts her inevitable torments upon his poor feet, chastises him for his indolence:

While the mornings are long, and you have leisure to go abroad, what do you do? Why, instead of gaining an appetite for breakfast, by salutary exercise, you amuse yourself with books, pamphlets, or newspapers, which commonly are not worth the reading. Yet you eat an inordinate breakfast, four dishes of tea, with cream, and one or two buttered toasts, with slices of hung beef, which I fancy are not things the most easily digested.

This is just one example amongst many of Franklin’s spry sense of humor to be brought forth by H. W. Brands in his The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin, a work with which even Madame Gout could find nothing to fault. After completing this biography, I found it difficult not to be thoroughly overwhelmed with the length and breadth of Franklin’s many, many accomplishments, seeing as he was a pioneer in many fields of American thought, from philosophy to physical science to political science, and all seemingly without effort.

Brands begins his tale of this familiar yet extraordinary American with an account of the pivotal event in Franklin’s life that led to his eventual break with Great Britain. He was at first a reluctant revolutionary, but this event – when he was called to appear before the Privy Council on January 29^th, 1774, at the Cockpit at Whitehall Palace – changed the course of his life and his loyalty. It is an excellent way to begin an account of Franklin’s life, for, this dignified servant of the Crown found himself subjected to a withering tirade from Alexander Wedderburn, the Solicitor General, and publicly humiliated. Before this humiliation Franklin was a proud Briton; after, he became a reluctant revolutionary.

From there, Brands moves in a conventional chronological manner, beginning with Franklin’s upbringing and eventual abandonment of Boston for Philadelphia where, alone and poor, his momentous life truly begins and does not let up until we arrive at his death (the only thing capable of stopping him, it would seem). The dizzying array of fields he dabbled in and made substantive contributions to is staggering. The First American achieves a level of detail that will allow you to appreciate the scope of Franklin's accomplishments within the time in which they occurred without ever getting bogged down in the dirty details, as Brands seems to have an appreciation for what Franklin really stood for. Franklin was not an ideal family man, and the book also gives a taste of this side of Franklin, as family seemed to play a lesser role in his life than his philosophical and scientific (and later, political) interests (one question the book did not answer for me was why he was known as “Dirty Ben” in some circles).

The book also gives a brief but not insufficient history of the American Revolution. Franklin played a pivotal and probably still underappreciated role in securing victory for the colonies. Why he and Alexander Hamilton are not considered at least “co-fathers” of the United States eludes me even more after reading this book, and I would have liked to have seen more as to why Franklin does not share Washington’s ubiquity in modern America. Reading H.W. Brands book will probably evoke similar questions to all readers.

The First American tells the story of a great human being, not just a great American, and while long it is well worth the effort. Franklin’s personal philosophy, elucidated brilliantly in the book, is still relevant today; by looking at his life and how he shaped it one can learn much about one’s own life and how to shape it.

“The Feud. The Hatfields and McCoys: The True Story”, by Dean King

 

448 pages, Little, Brown and Company, ISBN-13: 978-0316167062

There are some books that I buy that have a backstory, although I don’t always know what that backstory is. For instance, my copy of The Feud. The Hatfields and McCoys: The True Story by Dean King that I picked up from 2^nd & Charles has a hand-written dedication at the front that reads: “Enjoy The Hatfields are 2 of our great grandson there [sic] father is from Kentucky and is from the Hatfield clan Lang’s #117”. Putting the poor grammar aside, I’d really like to know more (Lang’s #117?), but that is impossible. The curiosity remains, though.

So anyway, Dean King has written an all-inclusive account of the feud between the Hatfields of West Virginia (led by William Anderson “Devil Anse” Hatfield) and the McCoys of Kentucky (led by Randolph “Ole Ran’l” McCoy). This real-life tale of hate and violence and pathos reads like a Greek tragedy, with the main players seemingly swept along by events they cannot control. This is natural-born drama, as King somehow enlivens this true story without sensationalizing it; like a novelist, he manages to preserve the tension of his tale utilizing all available primary and secondary sources while adding refinements of his own. There are a series of genealogical charts that help somewhat to keep the different players straight, especially as several have the same names, passed down from one generation to the next.

The Feud is a fascinating and entertaining account of perhaps America’s most notorious legend; birthed originally from the lingering bitterness of the Civil War, the Hatfield and McCoy feud was powered mostly by to the principle of protecting what’s yours, be it your family’s honor (or perhaps, “honor”) to the fruits of your labor. Across 24 chapters, King reconstructs the history of the Feud, from the original killing of Ellison Hatfield and the retaliatory killings of Pharmer, Bud and Bill McCoy, to all of the death and violence that followed thence. The dominos fall fast and hard and, seemingly, all on their own, with typically small slights being blown up into deadly encounters. King introduces each character in so intimate a manner that you find yourself sympathizing with their motivations, if not their actions. If you want the whole story of the Hatfield and McCoy feud look no further, for King has supplied us all with the unvarnished facts without any foolish romanticization.

“Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34”, by Bryan Burrough

 

624 pages, Penguin, ISBN-13: 978-0143115861

I saw the movie “Public Enemies” in the theater back in 2009 when it first came out and was thoroughly entertained by it, although even at the time I had to wonder to myself just how accurate it was – so when I found the book the movie was based on, Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-34 by Bryan Burrough, you just know I had to have it. But the cost of reading and owning this book meant that I had to give the movie up, because I found that there were just too many liberties taken with the historic truth for me to enjoy that movie ever again – pity, too, ‘cause it was a damn good movie.

The theme of the book is simple: the Feds, faced with an unprecedented national crime wave, had to create an enforcement organization on the fly capable of tracking fugitives across state lines and, in some cases, internationally. This task ultimately fell to a (‘til then) nameless, faceless bureaucrat named J. Edgar Hoover (I still have yet to read a satisfactory history as just how Hoover landed this job that so many better, more senior officials could have handled). While Public Enemies is the story of the founding of the FBI, it is the criminals and their actions that are the ultimate stars, the driving force, of the book. Typical.

What set the criminals of ’33-’34 apart from all of the scum that preceded them was the seemingly romantic glamour of a lost cause; once the overwhelming might of the Federal Government was brought to bear against them, there was no way in which they could win. Besides that, the Great Depression made Robin Hoodesque heroes out of these aimless losers. With millions of Americans unmoored by the Depression and adrift on America’s highways and byways – whole families sleeping in their cars, living in what were known, in a grimly chipper euphemism, as “tourist camps”, essentially middle-class shantytowns on wheels – these new criminals could be seen as striking back against The System, when all they were really doing was wandering aimlessly from place to place without a plan and without a future, robbing banks to feed their wanderlust and fuel their inability to do anything productive.

But for all that, they are with us still. Alvin Karpis, the shrewdest of all the bank robbers, took time out from his interstate flight to cruise the streets of Hollywood with his girlfriend, hoping to see an actual movie star, only to ultimately be arrested by none other than Hoover himself. He was one of the most notorious prisoners in the then-new federal penitentiary of Alcatraz, alongside Machine Gun Kelly who, it turns out, was a pussy-whipped whimp enthralled by his wife. Baby Face Nelson was gunned down trying to escape the Feds, but not before killing three of them first. The Barker Gang was broken up and “Ma” Barker, the supposed mastermind of her brood’s antics, was killed alongside her son, Fred (actually, Kate Barker was nothing more than an ill-tempered hillbilly who wanted nothing more than to play with her jigsaw puzzles; the myth of the motherly mastermind was invented by Hoover to justify her wrongful killing).

And there’s more, still. While Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd was the nation’s most wanted fugitive, his wife, Ruby, consorted with radio preachers, made a short film on a Christian theme and toured with the film and a vaudeville show called “Crime Doesn't Pay”, all while being bugged and tailed by a team of federal agents, though he was eventually gunned him down by officers of the East Liverpool (Ohio) Police Department. When Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow set off from Dallas on their muddled multistate murder spree, they took a famous set of photographs – Bonnie with a gun, Clyde and Bonnie with cigars – and the photos, widely published together with Bonnie’s eerie girlish poetry, became the very stuff of the magazines Bonnie herself had once read; their strange journey ended in Bienville Parish, Louisiana. And of course John Dillinger, likewise obsessed with movies, was shot by agents after seeing “Manhattan Melodrama” which featured Clark Gable playing a character not unlike John Dillinger. These outlaws loved the publicity and the public loved them back.

Strangely, the Oklahoma bank robber Pretty Boy Floyd would become a true folk hero of the plains, the subject of a classic Woody Guthrie song of protest against capitalism and the supposed evils attached to it:

Yes, as through this world I’ve wandered

I’ve seen lots of funny men

Some will rob you with a six-gun

And some with a fountain pen

Criminals as heroes. It’s an old, old theme, brought forth especially when times are tough and the future is murky, at best. I wonder: if our own times were more settled than they are, would Black Lives Matter and Antifa be enjoying their apparent popularity?

“The 10 Big Lies About America: Combating Destructive Distortions About Our Nation”, by Michael Medved

 

280 pages, Crown Forum, ISBN-13: 978-0307394064

Josh Billings (otherwise known as Henry Wheeler Shaw) was a famous humorist and lecturer in the United States during the latter half of the 19^th Century…but what concerns us here about him is one of his most famous quotes, namely: “It ain’t so much the things we don’t know that get us into trouble. It’s the things we know that just ain’t so”. Quite. And it is just this idea, our own ignorance of the important questions of the day, which concern Michael Medved in his The 10 Big Lies About America: Combating Destructive Distortions About Our Nation. And just what are these 10 Big Lies About America? Thought you’d never ask:

1. America was founded in genocide against Native Americas 
2. The United States is uniquely guilty for the crime of slavery 
3. The Founders intended a secular, not a Christian nation 
4. America has always been a multicultural society, strengthened by diversity 
5. The power of Big Business hurts the country and oppresses the people 
6. Government offers the only remedy for economic downturn and poverty 
7. America is an imperialist nation and a constant threat to world peace 
8. The two-party system is broken and we urgently need a viable third party 
9. There is a war going on against the American middle class 
10. America is in the midst of an irreversible moral decline

No nation is perfect, but the United States is, I have no problem in asserting, less evil than most. Take the founding, for instance: the long conflict between European settlers and the people they encountered in the “New World” was a lot more nuanced than the “policy of genocide” the left alleges based on either a distorted reading of historical events or on no evidence at all. The truth is there were brutalities on both sides, but even more examples of friendship and cooperation between American Indians and European settlers than there were bloody skirmishes. Medved also shows that a view of Native Americans as near saints living peacefully in harmony with their neighbors and the environment until Europeans showed up and ruined Eden is a total fiction. Americans Indian tribes fought almost constant wars between themselves before Europeans arrived.

Or how about slavery? As grotesque and utterly unjustifiable as the institution of slavery was, it was not peculiar to the West in general or to America in particular. It has existed throughout all of human history on all continents (in fact, it still exists in parts of Africa today and even China; think of the Uighurs). Indeed, it was Britain and America, with no help from anyone else, who were responsible for bringing it to an end in the West. Medved in no way apologizes for slavery (as some of the left have falsely claimed) but shows how ubiquitous it has been and how Western Christian values were central in ridding most of the world of this plague.

On Christianity, clearly the Founders only meant to prevent the central government from establishing one sect of Christianity as the nation’s official religion, not to drive all traces of religion from the public square. There are constant references to God and Christian principles in our founding documents and in the speeches of the Founders themselves. No one thought it the slightest problem that many states maintained official religions for decades after the First Amendment was adopted.

How about the role of government? Consider just one example: in 1931, during the middle of the Hoover administration and deep into the Great Depression, the national unemployment rate was 17.4 percent; in 1938, five years into FDR’s administration and after federal spending had tripled, regulation put into overdrive and countless economic experiments from Washington had been visited on the economy, the national unemployment rate was…17.4 percent. At no time during the New Deal decade of the 1930s did unemployment drop below 14 percent. So much for the idea that only Washington has all the answers.

You really need to read The 10 Big Lies About America I order to get the whole story, but I will leave you with words from the Gipper’s farewell address of Jan. 11^th, 1989: “We’ve got to teach history based not on what’s in fashion but what’s important…If we forget what we did, we won’t know who we are”. Looking at the US of A today, with ignoramuses burning down cities and calling for the imposition of friggin’ socialism – a system that has failed every single time it has been tried – I fear that we have already forgotten.

“Fins: Harley Earl, the Rise of General Motors, and the Glory Days of Detroit”, by William Knoedelseder

 

320 pages, Harper Business, ISBN-13: 978-0062289070

If you’ve never heard of Harley Earl – and damn you to Hell forever and ever if you haven’t – than you have at least heard of his many, many innovations to the automotive sciences. As told by William Knoedelseder in Fins: Harley Earl, the Rise of General Motors, and the Glory Days of Detroit, Earl was responsible for the creation that we moderns just take for granted (like so much), such as, well:

• Motorama Shows – First introduced in 1953, the Motorama was the groundbreaking precursor to today’s modern auto shows, and a staple of post war American pop culture
• The Concept Car – A brilliant marketing and merchandizing device for all global car makers today, concept cars boost general interest in the auto industry, exponentially increase auto sales and car show attendance, and enabled manufacturers to test and gage consumer reactions to new style and engineering ideas
• Women Car Designers – A powerful advocate of women's rights, Harley's hiring of the first prominent all-female design team in America's business world was groundbreaking, controversial, and extremely successful
• Tailfins – Outrageous and wildly popular, Earl’s tailfins are an instantly recognizable icon synonymous with one of the most beloved decades in American history, the 1950s
• Corvette – One of the 20^th Century’s greatest untold stories is the true genesis of the Corvette and Harley Earl’s role as its visionary designer and inventor
• Clay Modeling and Graphic Engineering – Using artistic techniques to help build and engineer cars, while industry standard today, was revolutionary technology when first introduced by Harley Earl, and two of his most influential methods were clay modeling and graphic engineering
• Interior Design and Color Studio – By employing some 75 interior designers, color stylists, fabric and plastic experts, and other craftsmen within a brand new Design Building at the GM Technical Center, Earl introduced the very first modern Interior Design section of any car company
• Annual Model Change – Harley Earl and GM’s mid-century dream team of business leaders initiated a modern tradition of recognizing and anticipating an automotive buyer’s wants and needs, something from which creating regular changes in design and style naturally evolved
• Invented the Car Designer – Before Harley Earl, the auto design profession wasn’t on the business map, but he was the industrial pioneer who revolutionarily merged art, science and engineering in the auto world
• The Modern Automobile – Fathering the modern car may seem like a grandiose claim until you add up the features Earl invented and imagined: first autonomous cars, onboard computers, telescopic power radio antennas, heated seats, tinted glass, electric windows, keyless entry, power convertible and pillarless tops, hidden spare tires, turn indicators, crash test dummies

I could go on and on and on…but don’t worry, I won’t. In Knoedelseder’s telling, Earl was much more than a giant of a man – at 6’5” he would be hard to miss anywhere he went – he was positively volcanic, both in his temperament and his creativity. But there was so much more to the man, too, such the fact that he was mildly dyslectic, or spoke with a stutter, or invented his own lexigraphy to tell his designers what he wanted, once telling an assistant that he wanted a car “to have a dooflunky, to come across, have a little hook in it, and then do a little rashoom or a zong”. Oh. Okay.

Having cut his teeth designing cars for the Hollywood elite such – his client list included Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Tom Mix and Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle – he was hired by General Motor’s Alfred Sloan and Charles Kettering as a special consultant and arrived in time to assist GM in the design of its 1927 LaSalle – only to become GM’s first head of design and rule dictatorially over the size, shape and look of all their vehicles for the next three decades. While I wish that Fins had more photos than it does (Google got a workout as I sought out all of the cars described therein), I found the book to be enlightening and entertaining, and not a little depressing, describing how it does when Detroit put the world on wheels and everybody wanted to live here.

“The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard”, by Robert E. Howard, illustrated by Greg Staples

 

523 pages, Del Rey, ISBN-13: 978-0345490209

In the early oughts, Del Rey began producing the complete works of Robert E. Howard; The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard, illustrated by Greg Staples, was the ninth volume to be published. The tales and more included in this latest volume of Howard’s work include: In the Forest of Villefere; A Song of the Werewolf Folk; Wolfshead; Up, John Kane!; Remembrance; The Dream Snake; Sea Curse; The Moor Ghost; Moon Mockery; The Little People; Dead Man’s Hate; The Tavern; Rattle of Bones; The Fear that Follows; The Spirit of Tom Molyneaux; Casonetto’s Last Song; The Touch of Death; Out of the Deep; A Legend of Faring Town; The Shadow of the Beast; Restless Waters; The Dead Slaver’s Tale; Dermod’s Bane; The Hills of the Dead; Dig Me No Grave; The Song of a Mad Minstrel; The Children of the Night; Musings; The Black Stone; The Thing on the Roof; The Dweller in Dark Valley; The Horror from the Mound; A Dull Sound as of Knocking; The People of the Dark; Delenda Est; The Cairn on the Headland; Worms of the Earth; The Symbol; The Valley of the Lost; The Hoofed Thing; The Noseless Horror; The Dwellers Under the Tombs; An Open Window; The House of Arabu; The Man on the Ground; Old Garfield’s Heart; Kelly the Conjure Man; Black Canaan; To a Woman; One Who Comes at Eventide; The Haunter of the Ring; Pigeons from Hell; The Dead Remember; The Fire of Asshurbanipal; Fragment; Which Will Scarcely Be Understood; Miscellanea; Golnar the Ape; Spectres in the Dark; The House; Untitled Fragment; and Appendices

It may (or may not) surprise you that Robert E. Howard was friends with Howard Phillips Lovecraft and that the two corresponded with and encouraged one another in their writings (indeed, Howard went so far as to incorporate Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos into some of his works). And so one shouldn’t be surprised that Howard also wrote some horror tales of his own. It must be said that Howard was never a writer of refinement and these – and all of his other stories, for that matter – are Pulp Fiction. This does not mean the writing is poor as Howard displays a knack for energetic and vivid storytelling with masterly painted scenery and characters who are powerful page presences, if rather two-dimensional. You’ll also see scads of Faulkner’s despised adjectives that populate plots that are not exactly complex. In other words: if you adore the atmospherics of Bram Stoker or the erudition of a M.R. James, Howard’s style may not be your cup of tea, old sport, but if you can bring yourself to look past such things then you’ll find chills and blood and darkness and fun. Howard may not cater to the literary gourmet in you, but if you find yourself craving a cheeseburger and fries, these meaty tales are sure to satisfy your appetite.

The power of Howard’s imagination is astounding, covering as it does a bewildering array of themes – from horror standards such as vampires and werewolves to sea monsters and Lovecraftian terrors – a wide range of subgenres – western, weird menace and historical fantasy – and of ages – from pre-Christian times, to the Roman Empire and (for him) contemporary settings. And now for the big fat elephant in the room: Some of Howard’s stories reflect obvious racial bias and contain overtly racist language. The argument has been made that Howard is, after all, a product of a different time or that he is merely depicting characters that use racist language (as in the included story Black Canaan) and so on. Whether you approve of such apologetics or not, the point is that, whatever the author’s ideology or intent, the words are there, on the page: they’re not nice to look at and aren’t going away. I, for one, did not feel uncomfortable seeing them repeated quite so often, but for some readers they may be reason enough to put down a book in disgust. Or not to be buy it at all. It is what it is, though, and forewarned is forearmed, so be advised that you are reading stories from a time that is, in many respects, quite alien to our own.

But what about these stories, anyway? Some are centered on sea life, such as Sea Curse, a brutal story of murder and revenge, and the gloomy Out of the Deep, describing the lethal deeds of a sea monster taking human shape. Solomon Kane makes an appearance in both Rattle of Bones, a dark, atmospheric piece set in a deserted tavern featuring a murderer, a thief and a vengeful skeleton, and in The Hills of the Dead, a graphic tale of voodoo and vampirism. A Lovecraftian atmosphere permeates The Black Stone, The Thing on the Roof and The Hoofed Thing, all powerful tales revolving around blaspheme cults, evil gods and alien creatures bringing death and terror into our world. Examples of Wild West horror are The Valley of the Lost, where ancient powers sleeping in a deserted cave return to reveal the forbidden secrets of the universe, The Horror from the Mound, a vampire story set in a desolate piece of land in west Texas, the vivid The Man on the Ground, depicting the final duel between two men fighting their perpetual feud, and Old Garfield’s Heart featuring a man who lives longer than a person should. The book includes some quite enjoyable pieces of historical horror set in pagan times in Worms of the Earth and The Cairn on the Headland, as well as private, modern horrors in The Spirit of Tom Molyneaux, the breathtaking account of a violent boxing match decided by the intervention of a ghostly fighter, The Dweller in Dark Valley, where the personal hate between two twin brothers blends nicely with cosmic evil lurking in the depth of the Earth, and The Haunter of the Ring, a pulp fiction piece in which a woman tries to kill her husband under the influence of an evil spirit summoned by a former lover. Naturally, the thrilling Black Canaan, a terrifying voodoo tale, as is included Howard’s masterpiece, Pigeons from Hell, an unforgettable piece disclosing the terrible, unholy secrets hidden in a mansion in the South and providing an exciting mix of voodoo, vengeance and killing.

With all of the problematic language and subjects aside, The Horror Stories of Robert E. Howard is an entertaining read that takes one back to the heady days of pulp fiction where writers wrote what they damn well pleased and entertained the masses with their tales of derring-do, darkness and sheer bloody violence. Those were the days.

“The Beatles: The Biography”, by Bob Spitz

 

992 pages, Back Bay Books, ISBN-13: 978-0316013314

I have been listening to The Beatles my whole life, and some of my earliest recollections are of plugging in my parent’s Eight-Track compilations of their songs and jamming away to the music in our rented house on Haverhill in Detroit. This love of All Things Beatles has never left me, and when I started collecting their albums as a young adult I sought to learn more about them as musicians and people. And so I bought and read 100 Best Beatles Songs: A Passionate Fan’s Guide by Michael Lewis & Stephen J. Spignesi (reviewed on October 9^th, 2014) and Shout! The True Story of the Beatles by Philip Norman (reviewed on November 15^th, 2017) and then The Mammoth Book of the Beatles edited by Sean Egan (reviewed on July 19^th, 2019), and found, to my shock and horror, that John Paul George and Ringo were human after all, with flaws and foibles aplenty to go along with their talent and drive. While there is still a place deep in my psyche that views the Four Lads from Liverpool as later-day Four Musketeers, the truth is the truth, and one must look upon Lennon, McCartney, Harrison and Starkey (Starr) as they were, which is exactly what Bob Spitz does in the brilliant The Beatles: The Biography.

The Beatles all grew up in the United Kingdom after the end of World War II, a country that was still recovering from war and an industrial port town, Liverpool, that had seen better days and in which these “Scousers” all nurtured a long-standing inferiority complex as regards to England’s upper classes in general and towards London in particular. The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), the government owned radio station, effectively embargoed American rock music as being substandard to their refined tastes, forcing teenagers across the sceptred isle to tune into Radio Luxembourg (of all places) to hear the latest from the likes of Elvis Presley and the Everly Brothers while reveling in England’s youth pop music of the time, Skiffle (which you can read about in Roots, Radicals and Rockers: How Skiffle Changed the World by Billy Bragg, reviewed on July 5^th, 2018). Amongst the many millions of such teenagers were Richard Starkey (born July 7^th, 1940), John Winston Lennon (born October 9^th, 1940), James Paul McCartney (born June 18^th, 1942) and George Harrison (born February 25^th, 1943). Contemporaries all with similar tastes in (American) music, yet very different all the same.

While sharing much in terms in interests and backgrounds, each was also a person of their own. From the very beginning you really get the sense that Ringo was glad just to be part of it and was easily the most affable of the group, though certainly it is Ringo who makes the Beatles who they are; one might question if, without Ringo, there could have been “The Beatles”, Pete Best be damned. Though Ringo is hardly an innocent babe in the woods – particularly when drugs enter the picture – he seems the most authentic, the most down-to-earth and the most you’d like to have a pint with.

John is easily the most difficult man of the group, full of hidden rages and scuppered dreams. He is the original Beatle (hell, he is also the original Quarryman) but torn between fear, self-loathing, brilliant wit and multiple insecurities (oh, the insecurities). He is a deep thinker but often expresses his intellect by hurting the most vulnerable people who love and befriend him, as well as his entourage and friends. And his obsession with Yoko “Bane of the Universe” Ono is nothing less than pathetic, a mere infatuation that morphed into an emotional dependence that saw him eventually sideline every other relationship in his life for her.

Paul is just as talented and just as productive as John – the best songs either man ever wrote they wrote together, “nose-to-nose” in their words – but also a sexual rogue, the last of The Beatles to get married as he was loath to let the roving rock star persona go. He was also the lead egotist of the group who needed always to be out front but, to be fair, The Beatles needed a firm, guiding hand to keep them on track, even if only for a few weeks in the studio. And while John Lennon has always been thought of as a Working Class Hero, he was decidedly Middle Class; it was Paul who was Blue Collar, although his family life was so much more grounded.

George, as the youngest, is rather immature but vastly superior to his mates as an instrumentalist, if not as a songwriter. But as his writing talents mature and improve (but not to the level of his two overbearing mates, as George Martin would attest to) his torment in being the Third Beatle smolders throughout much of Beatlemania until it finally bursts like a boil. While trying to find contentment, he is the first to turn to drugs and then, when seeing the dark path that way leads, turns instead to Eastern mysticism while taking the others along for the ride, even if just for a short time, and at last finding some equilibrium in his life.

Then there is Brian Epstein, the manager. He is, as the story unfolds, the best and the worst thing to happen to the Beatles, as his moxie, coupled with The Beatles’ stage charisma (and not a little luck), landed the group’s contract with Britain's recording giant EMI and its American subsidiary, Capital. Again, for complex reasons, Epstein was able to control the group’s inner dynamics after it became internationally famous. But he was a dreadful business manager and was too often distracted by a dark and violent homosexual lifestyle, and he cost the group close to a billion dollars in lost revenue.

Of course there is George Martin, the only true Fifth Beatle, no matter whoever else may lay claim to that moniker. The record producer, arranger, composer, conductor, audio engineer and musician took the Fab Four to musical heights they would never have achieved on their own, what with his eye for talent and his ear for hits. Before working with The Beatles and other pop musicians, he produced comedy and novelty records in the early 1950s, working with the likes of Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan and Bernard Cribbins, among others. It is impossible to imagine The Beatles being as successful as they were without Martin’s guiding hand.

The story of The Beatles is enduring because it is compelling, with brilliant talents and strong personalities first cooperating and then fighting to create something memorable and lasting. The Beatles spins the tale of the Fab Four like no other book on them ever has and, possibly, ever will. While George and Ringo (and Brian and George) cannot be left out of the equation that equals The Beatles, the relationship between John and Paul is at the centerpiece of the story, and Spitz is masterful in describing the twelve year relationship of the two. They became like brothers (though in the mold of Esau and Jacob, perhaps?), and though much has been written of their composing mastery, Spitz documents just how prolific and spontaneous they actually were and why George Martin focused so much time and attention on them, to the possible detriment of everyone else (sorry George). What is equally surprising is how they composed during periods of terrible strains in their relationships, personal and professional and with the ultimate goal always in sight but, once Lennon and McCartney could no longer be reconciled and at last drifted their separate ways, only then did The Beatles dissolve. Damnit.