Largely because of the Beatles, 1967 was the most important year for song since 1840. This study of the Beatles' work of 1967 offers deep and stimulating new research and speculation on the surrounding politics, communications media, commerce and the counterculture; inspiration ranging from non-western to avant garde musics; tension in the Beatles' masquerade; the role of gender in reception; and the album's influence on followers. -- Walter Everett, University of Michigan In this fifty-year retrospective on Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band and the Magical Mystery Tour film/EP/LP, Womack, Cox, and their writers have done what a good recap of these pop artifacts should do: not merely to 'celebrate' them for having aged so well, but to wrench readers out of their by now routine responses to the Beatles so as to have them experience, as if for the first time, the group's supreme masterpiece, their subsequent misadventures in film-making, and all of the lasting music they created in 1967, the year of the Summer of Love. -- Steven Hamelman, Coastal Carolina University