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It is an essential guidance for those readers generally interested in the topic and those practitians actually trying to model the exchange rate.
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The author shows the good and bad, the brilliant mixes, the bad editing and cutting on some songs, especially the earlier ones, and gives credit where credit is due. He can get a bit too overbearing at times, I happen to love the keyboard solo in "In My Life", I hardly notice the little flourish at the end of it which the author dislikes. On certain songs such as "Revolution", the author dispenses with song analysis altogether and starts writing an essay about the politics and culture of the time. This I found a bit annoying. The Beatles were a phenomenon, but as John Lennon once said, "we were just a little band who made it big". The music is meant to be enjoyed, from "Little Child" to "Glass Onion" to "For No One", there's no great social meaning to all this, it's just a rich pop tapestry.
Overall, a fascinating book, well worth it for Beatles fans and for those just discovering them.
It looks at all of the Beatles songs, in chronological order, and gives you little bits of insight into the stories, the logic and the madness that went into their creation. In a sense it is the history of the Beatles from the music's perspective, and fascinating it is too!
I guess this is a little intense for anyone with a passing interest in the Beatles or the music of the 60s, but for the rest of us, it is a wonderful reference book.
In place of cold dissection of the score, or tedious misinterpretation of the "meaning" of the songs, MacDonald proposes an explanation of how and why each Beatles song affects us. His critical stance is refreshingly honest: for example, few others have dared to give the White Album the treatment it deserves. Nevertheless, I have yet to discover a book that crystallises the magic of The Beatles with such grace and compassion.
The book is imbued with a sense of loss for the passing of the decade that produced all the music. I suspect that this must put off certain readers; to them I suggest that a careful reading of the Introduction is essential. But it's hard to imagine anyone with respect for the Beatles' legacy failing to enjoy this book.
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It is also bundled with some empirical data of before and after the agreement and also touches the trade with Mexico.