Customer Reviews

The Day John Met Paul: An Hour-by-Hour Account of How the Beatles Began

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I own too many books about the Beatles for my own good, and this book is in my top 5 favorites. Why? It is a very unusual Beatle-related book. This book took years to research and it pays off. I felt like I had relived the day that they actually met. It is just fascinating to read as the hours count down to the very moment that the two meet at the fete.
Please remember: This book is just about one small slice of Beatle lore.
If you have all the essential Beatle books, then this will be a nice variation for you.

I'm so disappointed in this book. Overall, it's like a bad teenage research paper. There's about 5 pages of content stretched into 138 pages of fluff. Admittedly, it has a narrow focus, but the author spends endlesss paragraphs talking about the weather and 'Rock-N-Roll lightning' striking instead of actually giving us insight into the people involved.

The author claims to have interviewed dozens of persons there that day but confines his narrative primarily to imagining how Paul and John felt. It would have been much better to just relate different persons observations about what they saw and remembered that day with a bit of narrative in between.

A representative example of the fluff throughout this book from page 102, "Like a dexterous pickpocket, a passing cloud steals the sun from the long gray vest of the sky. The cloud edge is black frosted. The shadows of the Liverpool field become more ill defined. It's a summer evening of deepening dampness. The humidity hangs in a dim blue haze. A sudden breeze whispers a warning of whimsical weather."

If you want to read a book of such poetry with a wee bit of Beatles info, then buy this book.

Jim O'Donnell has taken the oft-told of how John Lennon and Paul McCartney first met and made it into an entertaining look at the world at large and the world in Liverpool on that fateful day. Filled with background information and facts galore, O'Donnell sets a scene that takes the reader into the sights and sounds of the city and the Woolton fete. I recommend this book for any Beatles fan, and to anyone who enjoys a good story told well.