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Noteworthy Titles You May Have Missed
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Or Ringo’s visit to a doctor to address the drummer’s earache. As the unimpressed nurse reports later: “It’s a Beatles’ occupational disease. All that hair getting in their ears.”
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In 2020 Rolling Stone named Love Me Do! The Beatles’ Progress as the best book written on the group. Although Rolling Stone isn’t always right, they may have a point in this case. No less a personage than John Lennon also regarded Love Me Do! highly.
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Published 1964 by Penguin Books. Reissued in 1995 by Penguin, and in 2016 by Greymalkin Media.
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Journalist Michael Braun followed the young Beatles through England in late 1963, and on to the first concerts in the United States in 1964. Unfazed by the growing “Beatlemania,” Braun studied the Beatles not as phenomena but, refreshingly, as four relatively ordinary young men living day to day in the center of a whirlwind.
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Braun’s time with the Four before they were “Fab” captures the Beatles’ at their most lackluster, such as the pajamas-wearing Paul and Ringo sitting in an English hotel room with John, drinking room service rum and
cokes and leader Xavier Cugat on the radio, while they chatter like magpies.
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