1964

Born in Liverpool in 1942, Paul McCartney was raised in the city and educated at the Liverpool Institute. Since writing his first song at fourteen, McCartney has dreamed and dared to be different. He lives in England. Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and professor of law at Harvard Law School. She is also a staff writer at The New Yorker. Her many books include the international bestseller These Truths: A History of the United States. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

"1964: Eyes of the Storm...deserves to be received with the same gravity you'd pay any primary source for any great historical event... The adulation and protection and scrutiny coming from the subjects of these photos are being seen by the person who is the object of it... No matter how friendly he found the faces looking at him, this is the work of an idol in the making determined to stay a subject instead of becoming an object.... There’s an effortless familiarity to the shots of the boys reading the newspaper in their Plaza suite or looking up in the midst of a conversation halfway across the Atlantic, no guardedness when their eyes meet their mate’s camera.... For all of the generosity with which McCartney talks about America, for all the awe the group felt at being here and being accepted here, the photos show all the ways in which the Beatles, even before they arrived, had already outpaced the country.... [A] wonderful book, with its photos of a superpower as a sleepy giant, a country where most of the people couldn't see the future beyond a continuation of the sameness in which they already lived."