Mark Lewisohn is the Beatles' Boswell. There are few, if any, people alive who know more about the group than Lewisohn does. His -The Beatles Recording Sessions, which documents all of the Beatles' official recording sessions from 1962 to 1970, is a model for such projects in that it not only provides mounds of details and clears up many mysteries, but is also written in an entertaining, engrossing fashion accessible to the general reader. Lewisohn has also documented the Beatles' other activities in similarly comprehensive books, along with contributing sleeve notes to Beatles and John Lennon CD releases. As he is a skilled writer and researcher, one wishes that he would apply his top-drawer abilities to books on acts other than the Beatles. Known by the time he was in his early twenties as the "Beatle Brain of Britain," Lewisohn set upon the path of making Beatles chronicling a career when, in 1979, he began to assemble a complete list of their live appearances. This took much longer than he envisioned -- seven years, in fact -- the results being published in book form, with the simple listings embellished by much explanation and commentary, as -The Beatles Live! Soon after this, he was invited by EMI to listen to the Beatles' sessions, including most of their unreleased outtakes and alternate versions, as background research for -The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions. This involved a great many hours of listening, and in fact, according to the jacket for the book, he "has listened to more of the Beatles' recorded music than anybody else outside the group itself except their producer, George Martin."

Lewisohn did not stop there, though. He also interviewed anybody he could find who was involved in the sessions: Martin, engineers, technicians, session musicians, tape operators. He did not have access to two of the surviving Beatles, but managed to land a long interview with Paul McCartney, printed verbatim in the book, that illuminated many recordings and topics. This wealth of background information, and Lewisohn's deft integration of interview material with description of the tracks, the technology used to achieve the sound, and the Beatles' creative process, set this leagues apart from the standard dry discography. Most unusually, it also found a wide audience with the general public, hitting the best-seller lists after publication in 1988. This in turn has probably made it more possible for similar books to appear documenting the recording sessions of Bob Dylan, Elvis Presley, Jimi Hendrix, and others, though -The Complete Beatles remains the best of its type.

The best of Lewisohn's other volumes on the group is -The Complete Beatles Chronicles, which essentially combines the grist of both -The Beatles Live! and -The Complete Beatles. The large coffee table-sized volume is a diary-like record of their professional activities, including every stage and radio appearance and recording session, as well as acting, miming, and interviewing work in film, TV, video, and radio. Although this inevitably rehashes some information from both -The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions and -The Beatles Live!, it does contain a good deal of material (primarily related to more than their studio activities) not in those books, and is compiled so as to be enjoyable to read, rather than simply a detail-heavy reference tool. Lewisohn's name is apt to turn up in the credits of officially sanctioned Beatles archival projects, such as their #Anthology video documentary and CD reissues; he is also sometimes quoted as an authority on the group in the press. In his foreword to -The Complete Beatles Chronicles, George Martin declared, "Of all the chroniclers who have studied the lives of John, Paul, George, and Ringo, Mark Lewisohn stands supreme. His dedication in getting all the true facts and cataloguing them, coupled with a style of writing that is most readable, leaves him with no rival. Time and again he has proven that he knows far more about what we did and when we did it than any of us." ~ Richie Unterberger, Rovi