"A police officer contacted UFO experts after claiming he saw three aliens examining a freshly made crop circle in Wiltshire...."

Soundtrack: Donald Fagen's "IGY"

"It is highly salutary to read what was written about such movies before any ossification of critical orthodoxy. The close-up and in-context view of, let's say, Casablanca from Farber and from Agee will offer a truer perspective than its placement on a pedestal in spot number two on the AFI list of the 100 Greatest American Movies. Observes Farber: "Bogart's humanitarian killer, who was disillusioned apparently at his mother's breast, has to say some silly things and to play God too often to be as believably tough as he was in his last eight pictures." The titles of the articles alone can be priceless: "Blaboteur" for Saboteur, "Tinkle" for For Whom the Bell Tolls, "Hamburger Hell" for The Postman Always Rings Twice..."

See also: Ken Tucker in EW, Dante A. Ciampaglia in Forbes

Written when the author was only 28, the 423-page book (first published by Random House in 1988) is by a Colorado native who attended the well-regarded Oberlin College and Conservatory and earned degrees in English and piano performance. With those dual degrees, he is able to provide a thoughtful and rarely pedantic look at the Beatles that reveals so much about them through their songs, rather than through personality analysis.

Riley took on the intimidating task of discussing each song the Beatles ever composed or performed. Although he is an unabashed fan, he isn't a fanatic, and is opinionated and frank about songs he thinks are "schmaltz" ("Michelle").

He has an eye for detail. For example, he notes that the Beatles bawdily sing "tit, tit, tit" during the bridge of "Girl," and that John and George sing "Frère Jacques" nonsensically during the second verse of Paul's "Paperback Writer."

At times, Riley can overwhelm the casual fan with verbosity. But his exhaustive research on the songs, including much of the Beatles' solo work, does what every book on the Beatles should do: explain how four boys from Liverpool revolutionized popular music.

- David Burger, Salt Lake City Tribune

Beatles' Remasters coverage in the pipeline...

The Speech tapped into the primordial American myth: untrammeled individuality. There must be a territory for Huck Finn to light out to, a promised land where authority--or government--does not reach. In this always-beckoning frontier, all the hindrances that drag Americans down are left behind. Businessmen can run their businesses as they like, free from the plague of do-gooder bureaucrats. White people need not carry the spurious cross of racial guilt. Unruly and ungrateful minorities--pinkos and softies and degenerates and pointy-heads and uppity women-- are shown their place. Above all, the profoundly destabilizing specter of relativism, of compromise, of moral ambiguity, is banished. No longer need Americans accommodate themselves to evil. A divine certainty stretches from sea to shining sea.

This is as much a metaphysical wish as it is a political platform. It is a sermon as much as a speech. And it is in the gap between those two things--the space between the dream of absolute freedom and the reality of a fallen world--that America forever stumbles.

[Also, fine entries from Charles Taylor, Stephanie Zacharek, and one of the best Bob Dylan one-offs, from Joshua Clover.]