Still the Greatest: The Essential Songs of the Beatles' Solo Career

GIFT GUIDE 2012

• The Ties That Bind

  One last batch of music books for 2012

  BY RAOUL HERNANDEZ

• Waging Heavy Peace: A Hippie Dream

  Neil gets sober, but stays hippie

  BY JIM CALIGIURI

• > Still the Greatest: The Essential Songs of the Beatles' Solo Career

• Kicking and Dreaming: A Story of Heart, Soul, and Rock & Roll

  The Wilson sisters kicked ass and name names.

  BY GREG BEETS

• Jimi Hendrix: A Brother's Story

  Jimi's brother Leon has some insight, yes.

  BY KEVIN CURTIN

• Bruce Springsteen and the Promise of Rock & Roll

  Can't get academic on the Boss' keister.

  BY DOUG FREEMAN

• Mick Jagger

  Love and hope and sex and dreams still survive in Mick Jagger.

  BY MARGARET MOSER

• Makeup to Breakup: My Life In and Out of Kiss

  Kiss drummer may be the only one in the original band with any integrity, but it's still a sorry tale.

  BY RAOUL HERNANDEZ

• Who I Am

  The Who's heart and soul for 500 pages.

  BY MICHAEL TOLAND

• The Art of Punk

  Don't dance about architecture, simply flip through the art of punk.

  BY WAYNE ALAN BRENNER

• A Light That Never Goes Out: The Enduring Saga of the Smiths

  Discovering the Smiths.

  BY MICHAEL TOLAND

• The Alternative Hero

  Fictional account of a UK Eighties has-been band.

  BY ZOE CORDES SELBIN

Still the Greatest: The Essential Songs of the Beatles' Solo Careers

The Beatles in Comic Strips

Andrew Grant Jackson, wrangling fantasy playlists, goes so deep into the Beatles' post-breakup years that you might need scuba gear to enjoy the complex octopus' garden of facts, opinions, suppositions, and personal gossip here. What inspired who? Which stars showed up to what private jam? Who slept with the wife of the other guy the second time? Where the hell did Harry Nilsson put that dope? If God is truly in the details, this exhaustive second-act gospel radiates holy ghostliness. Enzo Gentile and Fabio Schiavo's coffeetable Comic Strips perfectly complements Still the Greatest, reprinting a swath of the Fab Four's appearances as illustrations in books, magazines, and newspapers. The breadth here will amaze you as much as the visuals themselves: the UK's Valentine romance magazine from 1964; Batman from 1970; Italy's Il Male from 1980; Playboy's Little Annie Fanny from 2001; Alex Robinson's 2005 Box Office Poison; and so many more between and beyond.