Abbey Road to Zapple Records: The Beatles Encyclopedia
Musician and Beatles fan Westover has compiled a clever assortment of charts and graphs to show how Capitol Records in the United States routinely dismantled the Beatles's original U.K. albums in order to create more product. Westover has created "fan-in" and "fan-out" charts that visually identify the U.K. sources for the songs on each of the Beatles's U.S. albums and vice versa. Also included are graphs that track each U.S. album's chart performance in Billboard. Unfortunately, because of their large scale, these graphs are difficult to read, and Westover makes no attempt to analyze an album's drastic fluctuation in chart position. Additional charts and tables include a list of the Beatles's Grammy nominations and awards, an overview of the various U.S. record companies that released Beatles product, and even a chart that sorts all Beatles songs by playing times. Despite its drawbacks, this unique book compiles information not easily found elsewhere. Knight's "encyclopedia" is not so successful. While Knight (Don't Fence Me In) did not intend to create an exhaustive reference work like Bill Harry's Ultimate Beatles Encyclopedia (Hyperion, 1993), his criteria for inclusion are purely subjective. He only included topics about which there was something "particularly fascinating to say." But readers don't even learn all the details about topics he does include. Instead, Knight tosses out one or two interesting tidbits and then moves on to the next event, emphasizing offbeat details. (He lists, for example, the five Beatles tracks on which George Harrison plays the sitar.) A fun read, but, unlike Westover, Knight adds nothing new to the ever-increasing list of books already available on the Beatles.ALloyd Jansen, Stockton-San Joaquin Cty. P.L., CACopyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.