Review: '100 Pivotal Moments in Beatles History'

The Beatles' story has been told many, many, many times, and though we're all anticipating newly uncovered revelations in the next volume of Mark Lewisohn's All These Years series that will no doubt be published someday in the current century, it isn't like the Beatles are making new historical milestones. So any Beatles scribe not as dedicated to research as Lewisohn (all of them) has to settle for figuring out novel ways to recycle the same old stories. 

John M. Borack's solution is to chop half-a-century of Beatles lore into 100 "pivotal moments" each related in a two or three page chapter. Such moments range from the obvious (chapters devoted to Bigger than Jesus, Shea Stadium, Paul is Dead, Butcher Sleeve, and each of The Beatles' albums and films) to the less obvious but hardly pivotal. File "Paul McCartney hires a new touring band in 2002" under pivotal moments in bending over backwards to fill a book. Borack's retelling is breezy and personable enough to make 100 Pivotal Moments in Beatles History pleasant to breeze through, but you'll have to look elsewhere for a truly pivotal Beatles book.