Fab
An Intimate Life of Paul McCartney
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
He is one of the most famous, most wealthy people on the planet, and yet he remains little-known and understood as a personality. At long last, Paul McCartney is the subject of a major, deeply researched, psychologically acute biography. It tells a story that will illuminate and surprise.
The publication finds McCartney - who turns 70 in 2012 - revitalized as a performer (touring with a set of mostly Beatles songs) and a man buffeted by profound changes in recent years: the death of his first wife, Linda; the death of George Harrison; a second marriage, to Heather Mills, and its spectacular failure, the fall-out from which is still crashing around him.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The accomplished biographer of Dylan and Bukowski delivers an engaging, set-the-record-straight biography of the benighted Beatles songster without showing much sympathy for his subject. Indeed, Sounes doesn't whitewash McCartney's Liverpudlian working-class upbringing, early promiscuity, or ongoing drug use. He effectively emphasizes how the death of McCartney's mother, when he was just 14, reverberated through his future relationships, as well as the ways in which his father's dance-hall music informed the tunes he favored, sometimes to John Lennon's chagrin. Sounes writes knowledgeably of the Beatles' close relationship with their tortured manager, Brian Epstein, the genius produced by George Martin, and the dismal details of the group's final falling out. Measured admiration is shown for Yoko Ono, a "catalyst for change" who shook up (and probably broke up) the band. Lennon's assassination is covered in a surprisingly cursory manner and Sounes's contempt for Linda McCartney's pursuits arrives undiluted. McCartney's musical accomplishments over the last 20 years are given solid weight and consideration, but McCartney himself comes across by turns arrogant, stingy, and manipulative; though Sounes packs in a lot, there's ultimately nothing so "intimate" that readers can't find elsewhere.
