Book

Author:	David Lewis [UK]
Title:	The Beatles: Liverpool Landscapes
Publisher:	DB Publishing
Country:	UK
Date:	22 Oct 2010
Format:	Paperback
Genre:	Music, History
ISBN13 / Barcode:	9781859837900
Rating:	Rate
Collection:	I Own It I Want It
Community:	1 Owns
Price Guide:	$5
» Search eBay #AD » Search Amazon #AD This site contains affiliate links for which we may be compensated.

PRICE GUIDE

Notes

‎192 pages. Book dimensions: 14.8 cms x 1.1 cms x 21 cms.

From Amazon:

The Beatles: Liverpool Landscapes fills in the gaps of their early history and roots them in the city. It places their family history and family life in the context of the wider history of the city stretching back 160 years. The city and world the Beatles knew is brought back to life - the trams and the cobbles, the gaslights, the docks and the overhead railway. No other city is as closely identified with an artist or a group of artists as Liverpool is with the Beatles. And no other band is as closely connected with a city as the Beatles are with Liverpool.

The Beatles: Liverpool Landscapes explores the stories and places that the Beatles knew well as children and young men. It explores the recognizable yet different Liverpool of the 1940s and 1950s, a city of bombsites and trams, the Overhead Railway, cobbles and gaslight. And The Beatles: Liverpool Landscapes also roots the band firmly in the older and broader history of the city, looking at Starkey, Lennon, Harrison and McCartney family stories in Everton or the Dock Road and the lost streets and houses the families knew. Family places and stories stretching back 160 years are explored, as well as the more immediate landscapes the Beatles knew as young men. This book restores the immediacy of their time and their presence in the city.

David Lewis has written extensively on Liverpool and assembled exhibitions of photographs and stories which explore the more unusual corners of the city. For The Beatles: Liverpool Landscapes, he took a series of walks and bus rides across the city, looking at where they came from and the places they knew: the places that made the families that made the Beatles.

Cover price: £9.99.

Images

Comments and Reviews


JPGR&B SUBS 22nd Apr 2022		Review Annotation: This exploration of Liverpool via text and photographs is Lewis's fifth book; previous books include a collection of walking tours and a best-seller about the development of the suburbs around the city. As such, the author is familiar with the phenomenon of Liverpool being an 800 year-old city with a sometimes-baffling inability to grasp the beauty and significance of itself and its treasures. Here, the city is seen as the backdrop for the story of the Beatles, but Lewis goes beyond offering the standard sights of The Cavern, Penny Lane and Strawberry Field. Those places are vital to the story, to be sure and they are covered, but he steps back in time to show the city the Beatles' families were born into and settled in, shaping their histories, as well as that of Liverpool. Lewis has a sense of the Beatles not just suddenly appearing as fully-grown mop-tops, but as Liverpudlians with roots in the city stretching back for generations. As a veteran explorer of the city, he defines his mission as tying their family histories to that of the city. In this, his descriptive, sometimes poetic narrative is excellent, as well as evocative. On the other hand, Lewis's a priori goal sets him to his task with preconceived images of not only the city, but the Beatles themselves - Lennon, the 'darkest Beatle, the angry one, volatile and unpredictable'; Paul drawing confidence from his parents, George the quiet, observant one, and Richie, the sickly one. It is a contrivance that is not needed here. Something that will surprise many, no doubt, is the pastoral, almost bucolic nature of the area where John Lennon grew up (Woolton Village) and the neighbouring Allerton where Paul McCartney lived from age 13 to the time he moved to London following the Beatles' success in 1963. Those accustomed to seeing the city as a blighted, decaying industrial wasteland or imagining the young Beatles playing on the docks are in for a shock. Liverpool was never an industrial centre anyway, but rather a busy seaport - one of the world's most important. Readers who expect to see dire photos of John Lennon's childhood as a future working class hero will be surprised to see 'Mendips' (his home had a name!) - a lovely two-storey detached home (duplex in American English) with a neat yard and driveway. McCartney grew up in public housing, but his home is nothing like the inner city slum that the phrase conjures up in America (of course, he never represents it as anything like that). Harrison grew up even farther out from the city in a council estate (British for project) that bears no resemblance to Cabrini Green in Chicago or the Baruch Homes in the Bronx; of the four, only Starr grew up in rough circumstances in the city. A map (several, actually, representing different eras) would have been useful and Lewis takes the poetry a tad far in noting the many opportune places in the city where the four (and others like Stuart Sutcliffe and Pete Best) might have crossed paths by coincidence before fateful meetings at church fetes or on the bus to school, but he does a good job in going far beyond presenting merely another picture book of the city. Lewis brings the tale to the present with a walk around Mathew Street and visits to the Eleanor Rigby and Lennon statues, finishing up with the National Trust tour of the childhood homes of John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Wandering through the rooms, taking a moment to sing in the porch where John and Paul were exiled to practice, listening to a girl play the piano in the McCartney living room, Lewis finally comes to the unavoidable conclusion that the homes and the city around them are living things and that the past is unreachable. We could have told him that, but the journey was (and is) not without interest along the way. Readers looking for an oversized glossy photo album of oft-seen Beatle-related sights like the gate at Strawberry Field supplemented with the usual views of the Liver Building and the Cathedrals will be disappointed. Those looking to explore the way a city forms and informs its people may well be intrigued. Melissa Davis Source: The Beatles Bibliography: A New Guide To The Literature - Michael Brocken and Melissa Davis (The Beatle Works Ltd., 2012), with acknowledgement, and used here with permission from the authors for educational and historical purposes only. ✔︎ Helpful Review?

Add a Comment or Review about this book

See Also

Book

Stuart Russell - More Heroes, Villains And Victims Of Hull And The East Riding - DB Publishing - Paperback - UK - 9781859839850 (2011)

Next by Publisher

Lists

The Beatles - A UK and Ireland Geographical Bibliography - 47 Books - List by JPGR&B

The Beatles: An Illustrated Bibliography, from 1955 to 2027 - 2964 Books - List by JPGR&B

This Book: Price Guide : Add Valuation : Add Image : Add Video : Add Missing Info : Make Correction : Add to List : Add See Also : Add Tag : Edit Images : Show Image Data : Credits : BBCode