Economics
Could Anything Have Saved the Beatles?
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You Never Give Me Your Money:
The Beatles After the Breakup
By Peter Doggett
Harper; 390 pp, $24.99
Of all the breakups across human history, the end of the Beatles has to be one of the most wasteful. Imagine what the Fab Four could have raked in over the years if they had behaved more like their rivals, the Rolling Stones, and not let their personal indulgences and adolescent resentments drive them apart. At the peak of their mutual disgust, the Beatles were world-famous multimillionaires in their late 20s, barely grown-ups in age and not at all in temperament. Their differences were surely heartfelt, but were they irreconcilable? Enlightened management might have kept them together.