We know how this story begins. The Cavern Club, Beatlemania, George Martin, India. Ken McNab knows he doesn't need to set up a book titled And In the End: The Last Days of the Beatles (buy now). He just drops us right into the thick of the action on January 2, 1969, as the Beatles gather in Twickenham Film Studios for a recording session that was meant to be a fun and easy-going return to their roots. Instead, it was the beginning of the end for the biggest band in the world.

It's fair to ask whether the world needs another Beatles book, but it's hard to argue with McNab's decision to focus his new book on 1969: the last year the Beatles were a band. And In the End is a reminder of just what an eventful year it was, and details the dynamics that were inexorably pulling the Fab Four apart. The book unfolds almost cinematically, moving from one unforgettable moment to the next.

The Let It Be sessions. The concert on the roof. The bed-in. The Abbey Road cover shoot. Separately and, decreasingly, together, the Beatles had a hell of a year. They recorded two albums, one of which stands among the greatest ever made and the other of which was a relative dud — which means it still includes classic tracks like "Get Back" and "Across the Universe."

Lennon launched his solo career with "Give Peace a Chance," recorded in a Montreal hotel room during a bed-in with his new wife Yoko Ono. He also wrote "The Ballad of John and Yoko," recorded with Paul McCartney alone and released as a Beatles single. McCartney wouldn't go solo until the following year, with a self-titled album launched with a press release making official what everybody already, one way or another, knew: the Beatles had broken up.

Why? McNab suggests the outcome was essentially inevitable. Lennon was through being a Beatle. He was obsessed with Ono, often strung out on heroin (his song "Cold Turkey," about the addiction, was vetoed as a Beatles track by McCartney and George Harrison), and tired of pretending "the boys" were still as tight as they'd been back in the Hard Day's Night days. A return to live performance, often dangled in those festival-happy days, seemed completely unappealing to Lennon and Harrison. What remained for the band, as a band, was making albums; and Abbey Road may only have been possible because the men knew, more or less consciously, it was the last one.

The book is also a reminder of what a massive machine the Beatles had become as a corporate entity, and what a mess their business affairs were. The decision to hire Allen Klein, the cutthroat manager who successfully managed to add the Beatles to his thorny crown of conquests, was divisive — but it was completely clear, McNab establishes, that someone take a firm hand in the band's financial operations.

Apple Corps was an utter shambles, a folly that hemorrhaged money to the likes of "Magic" Alex Madras, who McNab characterizes as "the money-eating inventor of an electronic pulsing apple and the aptly named 'Nothing Box.'" Between the astonishing 95% tax bracket the Beatles were subject to and their various expenses (including "sweets" for Lennon), "the Beatles were cash poor," writes McNab.

That put them in a poor position to prevail in the struggle to control their own song catalog. That situation was so complicated I had to do some additional research even after reading McNab's book, but here's the relatively short version.

The Lennon/McCartney song catalog was controlled by a publishing company called Northern Songs (famously dissed by George Harrison in the Yellow Submarine track "Only a Northern Song"). To reduce the Beatles' tax burden, the company was publicly traded. Lennon and McCartney spent basically all of 1969 trying to buy a controlling interest in the company, but instead it was bought by a series of investors who were only in it for the money. To this day, McCartney is still trying to regain control of the catalog.

The tussle over Northern Songs involved miscalculations by Lennon, McCartney, Klein, and relatives of Linda McCartney her husband brought in as advisors. In painful detail, And In the End depicts the Beatles struggling for control of their own legacy even as they're trying to give it a fitting sendoff.

The miracle, of course, is that they managed to do exactly that. The rooftop concert was magical, Abbey Road ended with an epic medley that climaxed with all four band members taking solos in turn (all on guitar except Starr, who was persuaded to indulge in one of his very few Beatles drum solos for the occasion), and the Beatles posed for iconic photos on Abbey Road and in EMI's London headquarters (recreating the stairwell photo from the cover of their 1963 debut album).

Martin even came back to produce Abbey Road, ditched for the Let It Be sessions. "We want to make another album," McCartney told him, "and we want to do it the way we used to do it." It wasn't just McCartney who wanted to give the old magic one last shot: even Lennon, on his way out the door, recognized the greatness of what the band had accomplish and what they could, and did, accomplish again.

Not that the sessions were without tension. A good chunk of the album was recorded by McCartney, Harrison, and Starr while Lennon was recovering from a car accident. When Lennon arrived, he installed Ono on a double bed, where she insisted that she be given a mic to...express herself. "Even by Lennon standards, it was an extraordinary turn of events," writes McNab.

In recent years, Ono has justly been celebrated for her artistic innovations and activism, with the "Yoko Ono broke up the Beatles" narrative firmly dismissed. McNab certainly doesn't blame her for breaking up the Beatles — the breakup was probably inevitable, and any role Ono had in the band's business was ultimately Lennon's responsibility — but nor does he understate the fact that her presence made any kind of return to normalcy impossible for the Beatles.

The issue, of course, was not so much Ono herself as what she represented: a new life for Lennon, personally and professionally, outside the band. McNab points out how eerily Lennon's own developing personal life paralleled McCartney's: both were newly married to women from abroad, and both would soon be new fathers. What's more, any division between Lennon and the others was at least matched by the division between McCartney and his three bandmates over the decision to hire Klein (who McCartney distrusted).

1969 was also the year Harrison came into his own; though McNab doesn't venture too far into music criticism, he submits that Harrison's two songs ("Something" and "Here Comes the Sun") are the two strongest on Abbey Road, and McCartney is on tape acknowledging that Harrison had fully risen to the level of himself and Lennon as a songwriter. Despite this validation, Harrison bristled that suggestion that he'd only recently become such a strong songwriter; he felt his contributions had been getting unfairly dismissed for the band's entire history. Meanwhile, Starr cheerfully penned "Octopus's Garden," polished up with Harrison's uncredited assistance.

While And In the End might be a little long on the business matters for casual Beatles fans, all in all it's a highly readable run through a remarkable year that, for lesser artists, might have been a complete wash. Instead, it produced some of the profoundest music of their careers. Then 1970 arrived, and the Beatles were no more: never again to share a stage, a studio, or even a photograph. The mic had dropped.

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Upcoming Rock and Roll Book Club picks

Tune in to The Current at 8:30 a.m. (Central) every Wednesday morning to hear Jay Gabler and Jill Riley talk about a new book. (Note that as of Sept. 3, the Rock and Roll Book Club will move from Wednesday to Thursday mornings.) Also, find Jay's reviews online.

August 26: Fangirls: Scenes from Modern Music Culture by Hannah Ewens (buy now)

September 3: If You See Me: My Six-Decade Journey in Rock and Roll by Pepé Willie (buy now)

September 10: Utopia Avenue by David Mitchell (buy now)

September 17: Blues All Around Me: The Autobiography of B.B. King (buy now)