Tune In: The Beatles: All These Years Audiobook

Quotes

• “A definitive history of the band…Mr. Lewisohn’s chronicle fills in vital details that had been missing from the existing beatles canon and corrects mistakes that have been reprinted for years.”

  — Wall Street Journal

• “This beyond-essential dive into the Beatles’ early Liverpool and Hamburg days is a wildly evocative portrait of our lads on the verge.”

  — Entertainment Weekly

• “The biggest, deepest Beatles book ever.”

  — Rolling Stone

• “An extensive and engrossing group biography built on a well-raked mountain of exacting new research…[Lewisohn] retells this epic tale in a manner that, while ambitious and, at times, even indulgent, also manages to be expertly controlled and propelling…This edition has a lean, polished feel that could make the curious itch for more, and Lewisohn’s obsessive scholarship offers provocative details…Lewisohn’s insider status has scored him priceless bounty…Many, many other books will be written about the Beatles. But Tune In, despite its bland title, will always hold an honored place among them.”

  — New York Times Book Review

• “Lewisohn treats his subjects seriously, as historical, if ultimately remarkable, figures, and eschews the myriad myths that have grown up around the band in favor of the sorts of details and minutiae, wrapped in a serious but breezy narrative, that give us the fullest picture of who John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and, eventually, Ringo Starr were.”

  — Esquire

• “I can think of no greater praise for Tune In than to say that it gives The Beatles the beginnings of the biography they deserve…Gripping.”

  — Financial Times

• “Astounding....packed with revelations and demystifications.”

  — Economist

• “Unlikely to be surpassed as factual record…Once anointed ‘Beatle Brain of Britain’ while working in accounts at BBC Radio, Lewisohn amasses and investigates facts without sacrificing an iota of the excitement.”

  — Telegraph (UK)

• “The story is told so definitively that, after this, that really should be it…Lewisohn is a Beatles oracle.”

  — Guardian (UK)

• “Astonishing...Lewisohn’s masterful, step-by-step account raises the intriguing possibility that the Beatle’s success was anything but foreordained.”

  — Bloomberg News

• “These are the least documented, least known years in the Beatles’ lives but in some ways the richest material, as Lewisohn shows John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Richy Starkey (not yet Ringo Starr) as wartime Liverpool babies who get inspired by American R&B, rock ’n’ roll, and skiffle records (the last played partially on washboards and tea chests) while becoming the first British generation in decades to avoid call-up to National Service.”

  — Chicago Tribune

• “The choicest parts of the band’s story are the early, prefame years, culminating with 1962. These are the hell-for-leather years, the period when a band from a grimy, bomb-scarred city—a city that didn’t exactly turn out world-beaters—defied long odds and commenced a quest that has something almost preordained about it. In this book, which focuses on 1957 to 1962, Lewisohn picks up on that supernal feel to the Beatles’ success, and at times his own wonder that all of this ever happened, with one amazing coincidence after another, feeds into our own…Lewisohn has a knack for underscoring the moment, the precise moment, when things change.”

  — Slate

• “If you love the Beatles, and good history, then this audiobook feast will both fill you up and whet your appetite for more. It’s one of the most detailed biographies written about a rock band, and by the end we’re still only up to 1962. Two more volumes are planned. Narrator Clive Mantle has a deep, rather formal, English accent…He reads with sterling diction, varies his pitch to keep this mammoth work moving, and occasionally allows a character voice to seep through.”

  — AudioFile