Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Categories
Memoirs

BEATLENESS

Candy Leonard

How the Beatles and Their Fans Remade the World

The Beatles arrived in the United States on February 7, 1964, and immediately became a constant, compelling presence in fans’ lives. For the next six years, the band presented a nonstop deluge of sounds, words, images, and ideas, transforming the childhood and adolescence of millions of baby boomers.

BEATLENESS explains how the band became a source of emotional, intellectual, aesthetic, and spiritual nurturance in fans’ lives, creating a relationship that was historically unique. Looking at that relationship against the backdrop of the sexual revolution, the Vietnam War, political assassinations, and other events of those tumultuous years, the book examines critically the often-heard assertion that the Beatles “changed everything” and shows how—through the interplay between the group, the fans, and the culture—that change came about. A generational memoir and cultural history based on hundreds of hours of in-depth interviews with first-generation fans, BEATLENESS allows readers to experience—or re-experience—what it was like to be a young person during those eventful and transformative years. Its fresh approach offers many new insights into the entire Beatle phenomenon and explains why the group still means so much to so man. Candy Leonard: is a first-generation Beatle fan, intimately familiar with their entire body of work, biography, the commentary on them, and Beatle fan culture. She is also a sociologist with a strong background in qualitative research, child development, popular culture, and media studies who has written and lectured on the Beatles.

Available products
Book Published 2014-08-01 by Skyhorse/Arcade

Comments

Very impressive. BEATLENESS not only describes what it was like to be a hard-core fan from the beginning (like me), but explains it in an historical and personal context. For forty years of The FEST we've been celebrating our love for The Beatles with thousands of fans. Now we have a word for it.

I love this book! The beautifully written BEATLENESS will not only bring to life all the excitement for those that weren’t living yet during the Beatle years, it will cause major goose bumps, all over again, to those who were there. It’s an incredibly hip and astute account of all the Beatles’ major happenings that affected so many people around the world who were riveted to their every move. I can’t wait to read it again!

Candy Leonard was ‘possessed’ when she first heard the Beatles, and BEATLENESS is her story and ours. It's breezy, smart and open-hearted, and everyone who grew up with the band—or wants to know what that was like—will appreciate its insights and feel its emotional impact.

A fascinating study of the Beatles’ resounding impact upon late-twentieth-century American culture . . . While hundreds of Beatles books stake claims about being the definitive work, Leonard’s BEATLENESS finally gets to the heart of the matter, offering readers new insights into the unusual and lasting nature of Beatles fandom.

From ex-employees to ex-lovers, we’ve seemingly heard from everyone associated with the Beatles. BEATLENESS finally lets us hear from another group: the fans whose lives were forever altered by rock’s greatest band. These are vivid snapshots of people who rode the wave—and suffered through the crash—of Beatlemania as much as anyone who worked for the band.