One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time by Craig Brown.




Since the 1980s, the number of books published about The Beatles seems to have grown exponentially year on year. If you're an obsessive, know-it-all fan of the band, like I am, you kinda wonder how much there is left to say about the Fab Four? I mean, after so many books – and particularly such landmark works as Philip Norman's Shout!, Ian MacDonald's Revolution in the Head, and Mark Lewisohn's The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions and All These Years, to name just four – how much more is there really to say?

Turns out, the answer to that is, "more than you think."

Craig Brown is very much interested in looking at the stories behind the main Beatles story that we've heard time and again. This is a book packed with the odd little anecdotes that haven't really been told before (or, at least, have only been seldomly told). It's made up of 150 self-contained stand-alone chapters, each providing insight into an array of supporting cast members to the Beatles' story whose only thing in common is their brushes with the Fab Four. Perhaps surprisingly, this method allows Brown to illuminate the bigger picture of The Beatles' tale in a quite wonderful and rather original way. We get chapters on such diverse people as actor Kenneth Williams, Richard and Margaret Asher (mother and father of Paul McCartney's '60s girlfriend Jane Asher), former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, playwright Joe Orton, German communist Walter Ulbricht and many more.

I think for me, the most affecting and eye-opening chapters were the ones each dealing with Jimmie Nicol, Eric Clague, and Melanie Coe. Nicol was a surrogate Beatle who filled in for Ringo on drums for 10 days in 1964, while Starr was having his tonsils out, and whose life afterwards went totally off the rails; Clague was the off-duty policeman who ran over and killed John Lennon's mother Julia while drunk in 1958 and who later became a postman whose round took him back to Menlove Avenue in Liverpool – the sight of the accident – where he had to deliver bags of fan mail addressed to the son of the woman he'd killed; Coe was the young runaway girl whose story in the Daily Mirror inspired McCartney to write the song "She's Leaving Home" in 1967, but who, coincidentally, had actually met the musician three years earlier when he chose her as the winner of a dance contest on ITV's seminal pop program Ready Steady Go! (something that Macca would have been entirely unaware of when he wrote the song).

Overall, this is a well written, light read, and Brown has a nicely satirical bent to his writing. His grasp of the era and the quirks of the story make this old familiar tale of the world's most famous band zing with a new freshness. It's not an essential Beatles book at all, but it is an enjoyable one for those of us who already know the basic events and maybe want to gaze through the cracks and learn more about the stories behind the story.

Egyptomania: Our Three Thousand Year Obsession with the Land of the Pharaohs by Bob Brier.




Professor Bob Brier is an American Egyptologist of some repute and is probably best known for having mummified a modern cadaver in the traditional ancient Egyptian manner – earning him the nickname of "Mr. Mummy" – and for his theory that Tutankhamun was murdered in a palace coup. Though he has authored many scholarly books and magazine articles on ancient Egypt, 2013's Egyptomania is an entertaining and accessible look at how the West has been romanced and captivated by the Egyptian civilisation throughout the years.

It traces Egyptomania from the Greek tourist Herodotus, who visited the Nile area in about 445 BC (by which time Egyptian civilisation was already ancient) and brought back to Greece the idea that Egypt was the source of much of their culture, causing a sensation which Brier sees as an early manifestation of Egyptomania. From there, we get chapters on Napoleon's attempt to conquer the land of the Pharaohs (accompanied by a team of scholars and academics, which resulted in the monumental French reference work, Description de l'Égypte), the moving of obelisks from Luxor, Alexandria and Heliopolis to Paris, London and New York in the late 19th century, and the wave of 20th century Egyptomania brought on by the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922, which resulted in a still ongoing parade of songs, films, household items and knickknacks of all kinds to cash in on our enduring interest in all things Egyptological.

Throughout the book, Brier attempts to pinpoint exactly what it is about Ancient Egypt that has fascinated us in the West for over 2,000 years. Why is it that children still beg to be taken to the Egyptian sections of museums, but never ask to see exhibits about the ancient Greeks or Mayans? Brier believes it is a combination of the romantic desert locale, the distance of thousands of years providing an ideal setting for a fantasyland in which to escape our modern lives, and the way in which the ancient Egyptians seem to have cheated death through the process of mummification and the enduring presence of their stone monuments.

Brier, himself, is the owner of a large collection of Egyptomania items from across popular culture and the book contains gorgeous colour plates of many of his pieces. He's a good writer too, with an entertaining and easy to read style, which makes this a breeze to get through. One criticism would be that his account of the moving of an obelisk from Alexandria to New York's Central Park in 1881 is given far more space than it probably deserves and causes the book to drag slightly at this point.

Nevertheless, this is a fun popular history book, aimed squarely at the general public, rather than a more academic audience. So, if you're at all interested in the ways in which ancient Egypt has been misunderstood, appropriated and exploited by the West, this book does an excellent job of illustrating the history of how Egyptian fever seduced the world.

Yeah, I'm glad you liked them. He's a tremendous lecturer: very easy to watch, listen to and absorb information from. I've actually started re-watching his Great Courses series of lectures on Ancient Egypt on YouTube again from the start (currently up to lecture 18 out of 48). It's just so watchable.

Here's episode 1 if anybody else wants to give the series a try...

The Making of an African Legend: The Biafra Story
Frederick Forsyth, 1977

I’ve been interested in reading this for quite some time now, and was pleasantly surprised to find it recently in a local library’s giveaway box (just after I had coincidentally checked out another book on the same topic).
This is a slightly updated version (it has a new prologue, epilogue and a few updated chapters) of The Biafra Story, originally published in late 1969, making it Forsyth’s first published book. It’s based on his reporting on the Nigeria/Biafra in the late 1960s, first as a BCC correspondent and then as a freelance journalist. Forsyth provides a pretty good overview of Nigerian colonial history and, especially, a rundown of the events in 1966 that eventually led to the Biafran secession in 1967. The subsequent individual chapters contain a pretty detailed account of wartime operations, several rounds of abortive peace talks and international aid efforts. What makes this book quite interesting is that Forsyth makes no claim to provide an unbiased account: he’s very pro-Biafra, and he’s unsparing in his criticism of the British government in particular (which claimed neutrality through most of the conflict but was secretly selling arms to the Nigerian central government the entire time) but also other international actors – so the US State Department gets its own share of invective, as one would expect.
There are, however, some problematic aspects. Personally, although I share Forsyth’s admiration for the Igbo people (the majority of Biafra’s population), I found his need to compliment them by putting down pretty much everyone else in Africa rather offputting (e.g. at one point, he says of them: “Rarely among Africans, they have a gift of unceasing hard work.”). Despite that, and the fact that there are now many more authoritative books and memoirs on the Biafran war (also known as the Nigerian civil war), Forsyth’s book still makes for interesting reading.

High Sierra by W.R. Burnett

I'm can't pinpoint exactly when I first watched the film version of High Sierra, starring Humphrey Bogart and Ida Lupino and directed by Raoul Walsh.  It was probably on the late show on TV when I was in junior high.  I've seen it a number of times since because, Humphrey Bogart.  What I had never done, until now is read Bunbett's novel.  Burnett was probably equally well known as a screenwriter as he was a novelist.  He frequently adapted his own work including Little Caesar, uncredited work on the adaptation of The Asphalt Jungle and co-scripting High Sierra with the great John Huston.  

If you've seen the movie you're going to already know the book.  Burnett and Huston followed it very closely.  The biggest changes are in the ending, which still rings true in the film but is a tad more Hollywood.  Bank robber and Dillinger confederate Roy Earle has been sprung from prison on a paid for pardon in order to head up a robbery at a fashionable resort hotel in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.  On the way he meets an older gentleman and lady from the Midwest traveling with their lovely granddaughter who suffers from a clubfoot.  This constitutes a fairly important sub-plot.  The other members of the group are all small-timers and one has brought along Marie, a dime-a-dance girl from L.A.  Of course she causes dissension and the inexperience of the other three, in particular the "inside man" at the hotel cause the job to go awry.  

This is one of those instances were the book and the movie are extremely similar and since I watched the film first (and a number of times at that) I can't help but see Bogie and Ida Lupino as Earle and Marie, Henry Travers as Pa, etc.  Whether you've seen the film or not, this is a very solid crime novel from a writer who probably isn't as well remembered as a novelist as he should be.  

I absolutely adore Ida Lupino, who was an accomplished actress a very good director and just absolutely lovely.

There Was a Country. A Personal History of Biafra
Chinua Achebe, 2012

Far more than Frederick Forsyth’s book on the same topic (reviewed above, just scroll up a bit), I’ve been interested in reading this one ever it had been published because a) Achebe is a favorite author of mine (I love his novels), and b) he was a front-row witness to and even participant in the events of the Biafra secession and war in Nigeria. So while recounting many of the general events of the time, he also recounts his personal travails, because as an Igbo (the largest ethnic/national group in Biafra) he and his family had to flee from Lagos, the Nigerian capital at the time, in west, where they were living at the time, to the east, where Biafra was. He also briefly served as an envoy, traveling to other African countries as well as Europe and US to advocate on behalf of the new country. Achebe provides a great deal of insight into the internal politics and social relations in Nigeria during the 1960s in the lead-up to the Biafran secession, as well as considerable details on the policies of both the Nigerian federal government and the Biafran leadership during and just after the war. In particular, I found his views of the Biafran leader, Chukwuemeka Ojukwu, far more nuanced and critical than Forsyth’s, who really lionized him, and later wrote a biography about him. (An interesting detail, that Achebe does not make much of, is that his older sister was Ojukwu's first wife - they had already divorced by the time of the events recounted in this book). Also, his conclusions, writing with 40 years of hindsight, are quite depressing, as he notes that in many ways things only got worse in Nigeria: the country is still dealing with sharp ethnic divisions and corruption is so rife as to almost be comical. This is a very informative, sobering and above all worthwhile book.