Shake It Up, Baby!
The Rise of Beatlemania and the Mayhem of 1963

This is an enjoyable Beatles book. The author clearly put a ton of time into tracking down and interviewing people who encountered them on their rise to fame, and the result is sort of a “Beatles through the eyes of ordinary people,” which is more fascinating than it sounds. Especially when there ha......more

I was 7 in 1964 when I saw the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, so as for most Americans, Beatlemania started for me in 1964. When I first saw this title, I thought it was a misprint. Surely the author meant 1964! But of course, this book is about the very first cases of Beatlemania, in England in 1963. I en......more

As a American teenager in 1964, for me The Beatles story began with their historic Ed Sullivan show in February, 1964. Their meteoric rise in Britain during 1963 was completely unknown to us at the time. Back then, we didn't even know the American albums were completely different from their British......more

An honest rating of this book would be 3 1/2 to 4 stars. As the ultimate fan of the Beatles, one who is old enough to remember Beatlemania and is still here to talk about it, I feel qualified to say that this book does not meet expectations. A number of key facts are simply incorrect. This is not th......more

Though I did learn some new things from this (such as the fact that apparently the story of Ed Sullivan seeing the mayhem of the Beatles at a London airport before booking him is a lie...and that Anna Wintour had a hand in Maureen Cleave heading to Liverpool to cover them), this wasn't written in th......more