For those of us who were born post-"Abbey Road," Beatlemania can be a difficult concept to grasp. Sure, many of us go through the "Beatles phase," where we discover the music and the legends for ourselves. We come to like or even love the music and idolize the people who made it. But there still are a lot of things we don't understand.

Why were the girls screaming? Why was that haircut, tame by today's standards, so rebellious? How could one band possibly have meant so much to so many people for so long?

"In My Life: Encounters With the Beatles" -- a collection of essays, poetry and stories -- does a great job of answering those questions, or at least telling us why they can never really be answered.

Robert Cording, Shelli Jankowski-Smith and E.J. Miller Laino, the editors of "In My Life," deserve credit for bringing this wonderful little mess into existence. The book brings together the writings of Tom Wolfe, Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, Philip Larkin, Leonard Bernstein and many writers, poets, artists, musicians and doctors, focusing on the individual perspective.

Most books about the Beatles delve into the band's history and give you an analysis of everything it did and its immediate impact on society as a whole. They'll show you pictures of "The Ed Sullivan Show" and the anti-Beatles rallies after John Lennon's infamous remark about the Beatles being "bigger than Jesus Christ." Every date and time of every performance, recording and appearance is neatly recorded, and captioned with a blurb to point out its significance in the history of the Beatles.

For once, a book has discovered how academic and trivial that approach can be. If you want to understand what the Beatles meant to real, everyday people, read "In My Life."

Each work in this compendium, many of them previously published, shows what the Beatles meant to a specific person or small group of people, and how their lives were affected by the phenomenon of Beatlemania. There is really no broad, sweeping brush that paints a complete picture of what the Beatles were. This is a mural, each part adding its shape to a vague but recognizable whole, offering a better understanding of what it was like to grow up with the band.

The book follows a rough chronology, starting with David Wojahn's "Fab Four Tour Deutschland: Hamburg, 1961," and ending with Francine Witte's "When the Last Beatle Dies." Fittingly enough, the first poem covers the Beatles' first experience with fame, and the last looks a few decades into the future to close out an era. If Beatlemania seems confusing to my generation, what will it be like a couple of generations ahead of me, when Paul isn't unplugging to sing his silly love songs and Ringo isn't touring with aging oldies acts?

Many of the early essays and stories take one of those screaming girls out of the crowd and show what her life was like, and why she was there screaming in the first place. "Hello, Goodbye" is the story of a girl discovering herself and hoping to catch John's eye at a concert. When she meets him and gets brushed off, it just feeds her fantasy. The Beatles were the vehicle she used to get from girlhood to adolescence, and she was willing to make excuses for their faults.

"Not a Second Time," by Nancy Fox, finds another one of these girls in the crowd indulging herself in innocent fantasy about the Beatles. She finds herself even more attracted to the rebellion the Beatles offered after her family and the nuns at school disapprove of her and her friend Carol Ann talking about the band.

The later psychedelic era finds the Beatles at the center of attention of a whole scene, whether they actually showed up or not. This is where the excerpt from Tom Wolfe's "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" and TimothyLeary's loopy essay come in. Leary, always good for a laugh, sees the Beatles as new messiahs, come to Earth in a way we can all understand to teach us a higher consciousness (as if Leary was conscious to begin with). Wolfe shows Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters crashing a Beatles concert.

Ginsberg visits the same scene in "First Party at Ken Kesey's With Hell's Angels," mentioning the Beatles as part of the sounds moving the kids at the party. In most of the poetry, the Beatles are simply mentioned in passing, which automatically defines a place and time, leaving the authors to describe what was happening around them.

"In My Life" also doesn't shy away from people who didn't like or understand the Beatles. Norman Paul Hyett's "Waiting on the Beatles" is written from the perspective of a guy working in a diner where the Beatles ate after a concert in Philadelphia. He watches, disgusted, as his bosses fawn all over the group and their entourage. He's interested only in getting his tip and getting away from the incredibly rude bunch of foreigners forcing him to work late.

In a rare politically charged moment in the book, Larry Neal's "A Different Bag" compares the Beatles to soul and blues artists such as Aretha Franklin and John Lee Hooker, expanding it