Can't Buy Me Love: The Beatles, Britain, and America

I tried hard to like this book. I really did. But it tries to be so many things to so many people, it took considerable effort to get all the way through it before it comes out in paperback.

The book is billed as "group biography, cultural history and musical criticism." Yeah, see, that's the problem.

If you are a musician, I'm sure you'd find the detailed analysis and critique of the music interesting. If, like me, you don't know a half-note from a Picardy third, and really only know what you like and don't like and don't much care about why, it's slow going.

The cultural history is fairly interesting, but it is often a stretch to connect what was happening in Britain and America in the '60s to the ostensible subject of the book: the beginning, middle, and end of The Beatles.

The best part is the group biography. Although it offers nothing we didn't already know about the group or its individual members, it is the most interesting part of the book, even though the approach is very much in the third-person, with few quotes or photos.

Unfortunately, the three parts aren't neatly segregated from one another, making it impossible to isolate the better parts from the not-so. This really could have, and probably should have been two books: a critical analysis of The Beatles' music, and a biography. The cultural history could probably go away altogether and not be missed. Taken together, the result is more textbook than entertainment.

Clearly, my views are not shared by Mark Rotella, who wrote in Publisher's Weekly that the book is "brilliant ... engrossing ... music writing at its best." I can only assume that we read the same book.

I purposely didn't give the book a rating because it will have different levels of interest for different readers, depending on which of the three distinct subject areas are appealing. Just don't expect a casual weekend read.