‘Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run,’ Paul McCartney

How do you form another band after the Beatles? Only Paul McCartney had the guts to start from scratch. Wings, an oral history of McCartney’s other band, draws from hours of interviews with him and his bandmates and chronicles the group’s ascent. It’s easy to think that Beatle status would have made things easy for McCartney, but the book contextualizes all he was up against, including facing sexism for including his wife Linda in the lineup (“People don’t realize how important [Linda’s harmonization] was,” Denny Laine says) and the daunting challenge of living up to your own legend. “The idea from the beginning had been to start small, not really knowing what we’re doing,” McCartney says in the book. Once running, they recorded Band on the Run, toured in a school bus, and established a second legacy for a musician who could’ve just coasted for the rest of his life. —K.G.