It's not just the band name The Beatles that's funny — the Fab Four themselves were as goofy as all get-out. Q: How do you find all this business of having screaming girls following you all over the place? George: Well, we feel flattered... John:... and flattened. When the Beatles burst onto the American music scene in the early 1960s, they were just four unknown lads from Liverpool. But soon their off-the-charts talent and offbeat humor made them the most famous band on both sides of the Atlantic. This lively picture book, with it's gorgeous, expressive, and suitably quirky paintings, chronicles the phenomenal rise of Beatlemania, showing how the Fab Four's sense of humor helped deflect everything that was thrown their way — including jellybeans.

Every kid knows that pirates talk funny, swing a big sword, and seek buried treasure — don’t they? What do we really know about Blackbeard, Madame Cheng, Sir Francis Drake, and other men and women of pirate history? What drove them to sail the high seas? What were their bad habits, favorite foods, and silly quirks? And did they actually talk like that? A lively style, lots of surprises, and solid research have made the Lives of... series of collective biographies popular with both kids and adults. Now the series returns, spanning the globe with profiles of the nineteen most notorious pirates in history.

It's no secret that Beethoven went deaf, that Mozart had constant money problems, and that Gilbert and Sullivan wrote musicals. But what were these people — and other famous musicians — really like? What did they eat? What did they wear? How did they spend their time? And — possibly most interesting of all — what did their neighbors think? Discover the fascinating and often humorous stories of twenty famous musicians — people of all shapes, sizes, temperaments, and lifestyles, from various countries and historical periods. Beginning with Vivaldi and ending with Woodie Guthrie, Lives of the Musicians brings musical history to life.