Two of Us: The Story of a Father, a Son, and the Beatles [Hardcover]

Peter Smith (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 4, 2004

Before seven-year-old Sam Smith discovered the Beatles, he and his father had little in common. Like so many other kids his age, Sam was drawn first to the Fab Four by their trivia as much as by their music and personalities. Peter Smith was content to point Sam to all the clues of Paul McCartney’s putative demise, to reveal who "Julia" was, and so forth. But soon the Beatles opened the two Smiths to each other, and to a harmonious new friendship. They found themselves using the band’s songs and exploits to fuel discussions of life’s splendid complications -- friendship, teamwork, romance, art -- and its inevitable sorrows -- failure, betrayal, and mortality.
Music fans will delight in this singular celebration of the Beatles’ history and continuing cross-generational appeal. Smith takes us everywhere the Fab Four took him and Sam: from the boy’s Beatle-drenched bedroom to the circus of devotion that is Beatlefest to Paul McCartney’s childhood bedroom in a Liverpool row house. Ultimately, the two Smiths come to realize that the object of their affection transcends any facts that could ever be amassed about it. The Beatles’ essence isn’t in Liverpool or London or in heavily annotated lyric sheets. It is, of course, in their songs, and in how they help us understand ourselves and connect with each other.
With a wit and clarity reminiscent of of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity and Stefan Fatsis’s Word Freak, Smith limns the intensity of an obsession. And he evokes with wry intelligence the love a father and son can share.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This sincere but uneven memoir by novelist Smith (A Good Family) recounts how he and his seven-year-old son were brought closer together through a mutual love of the Beatles. After young Sam discovers his parents' old albums and cassettes, he takes to the Fab Four with a love that finds him teaching his Beatle-loving parents "more than we could ever teach him: names, dates, working song titles, even the Liverpool bus routes Paul and George took as adolescents." Smith shows how he was able to use the Beatles' saga, with its combination of "boyhood friendships" and "insanely intricate relationships," to answer his son's questions about life, love, art and death. He also provides excellent insights into the ongoing appeal of the Beatles for ever-younger audiences, and how "the Beatles' universe offers up the dreamy self-containment of any great magical realm." However, perhaps because Boomer-era Smith admits he was a McCartney fan while the harder-edged Lennon seemed scary, he too often veers from providing insight to serving treacle, such as his repeated references to his son's beauty, his attempts to resolve his feelings about his own father and a moment at the real Penny Lane during a father-son road trip to Liverpool when he asks, "Where was my childhood?" Still, this has more than enough poignant moments for any parent who has sung along with their children to Help! or who cried when George Harrison died.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

At a loss with his seven-year-old son, Smith sensed a distance gaping between them that resembled the distance between him and his shy, kind father. Why wasn't he in the pictures Sam drew? Why were their walks to school so silent? Then Sam met the Beatles, and a seemingly endless font of conversation sprung forth. Sam and his dad discovered they could haltingly play Beatles songs together on the piano and that they shared a favorite Sgt. Pepper track. In a touching and hilarious chapter, they find they are both a little distressed by the intensity of fandom at a Beatlefest. Elsewhere, they face head-on the darker side of the Beatles: divorces, jealousy, anger, money, and death. Ultimately, just as Sam's fascination begins to fade, father and son travel to Liverpool and find that the Beatles' slightly grimy, mundane origins make their myth even more transcendental. For Sam, the Beatles are a portal to music; to his father, the doorway to friendship with his son. Roberta Johnson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; annotated edition edition (February 4, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0618251456
• ISBN-13: 978-0618251452
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,120,941 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars If you like Nick Hornby, you'll love this book, January 29, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Two of Us: The Story of a Father, a Son, and the Beatles (Hardcover)

What a terrific writer Smith is. He has a natural understanding of music, kids, and, finally, the world. "Two of Us" is a funny, charming, pitch-perfect gem that is reminiscent of Hornby's "High Fidelity" and "About a Boy," but which has its own distinctive style and great good humor. The book made me miss the Beatles, and made me miss being a kid, but it also reminded me of the ways in which anything important that's ever happened to you, and any great album you've ever listened to, will stay with you forever.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Beautiful Memoir, February 10, 2004

By A Customer

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Two of Us: The Story of a Father, a Son, and the Beatles (Hardcover)

Like a lot of kids, Smith found that the sports-thing wasn't going to work for him and his own son. Plus, he was getting a little tired of listening to kids' music during the long car rides he and his family took. The Beatles hit the spot perfectly. Two of Us isn't just a look at how a father and a son bonded over music, it shows 1) how the Beatles just keep on trucking, year after year 2) how parents can "bond" over something cultural in a sports-nutty country; and 3) the joys of introducing your kids to something really great and lasting and elevating in a world of crappy music and video games. The book will make you laugh and make you cry and when you're done with it, I guarantee you: you'll go straight to the record player, or CD player, and play Beatles non-stop!

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars An enjoyable and entertaining mess of a book., March 14, 2004

By 

David J. Gannon (San Antonio, TX USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Two of Us: The Story of a Father, a Son, and the Beatles (Hardcover)

Reading Two of Us : The Story of a Father, a Son, and the Beatles by Peter Smith I was reminded of one of my own Beatle moments growing up. I was over at a friend's house waiting for him to finish getting ready to go watch a baseball game. His younger brother, then in 6th grade I'd imagine, and I were watching the American Bandstand show where the first films of the Beatles in their Sgt. Pepper facial hair was showing. After the film Dick Clark was asking some of the teen girls in the audience what they thought. "Yuck! They're so old looking and ugly" was the consensus. I remember turning to Roger and asking what he thought? "Those girls better get used to it," Roger said, "because in 3 months everybody's gonna look like that". A statement that proved to be very prophetic.

I mention this because as you read Two of Us you will have many such recollections, both dealing with your own youth and adolescence as well as those of your kid's if you are a parent. And that is what makes this book so enjoyable-you are flashing back over your own life and experiences as you share those of Peter Smith and his son. The shared experience adds greatly to the narrative and makes reading this book a very personal sort of experience.

Unfortunately, it's a somewhat disappointing experience as well. The problem is that Smith takes this work in a lot of directions that may have been meaningful for him personally but are pretty much boringly meaningless detail to the reader. There's a lot of introspection about the relationship between the author and his father-an entity so fleetingly described as to be little more than a caricature to the reader. Thus, all the prose associated with the comparison of Smiths relationship to his dad and comparing that to his relationship to his son is more irritating than enlightening.

Smith is also wont to let his metro-sexual side intrude into the text. That he thinks his son is "beautiful" is ok-but he keeps using that phrase throughout the book. The touchy-feely aspects of the book wear one down after a while.

Lastly, there's a dissonance to the thread of the book. The Beatles bring son and father together and, as could be expected, eventually, as the boy grows, that's not enough any more. They grow out of this device. There is no indication that Smith is working on a way to keep the relationship alive outside a Beatles context. This is supposed to be a book about an adult trying to engage a youth-yet the adult seems to be the one who's having trouble growing and communicating here.

However, for a time there is a connecting through the vortex of the Beatles, and there are some magical aspects to this relationship and the story of it. In the end one is left with a sense of wonder that has more to do with the Beatles than with this father-son combo-what's is the power of their existence that creates a dynamic that can, and often does, bridge generations? If the book does one thing well, it's stimulate the reader to examine that phenomenon within the context of his own experience. In the end the power of the book is that Sam and Peter's experience highlights and reveals our own experiences.