John Lennon - The Life

A quarter-century after his death and nearly four decades after the Beatles dissolved, John Lennon remains a towering popular-culture figure, warranting this new contribution to the already prodigious Lennon library, by the author of the Beatles biography Shout (1997). Although Lennon’s later life, exhaustively covered by the media from the 1964 onset of Beatlemania forward, is wearyingly familiar to the general public, let alone the devoted fans who will constitute most of this book’s audience, Norman manages to unearth a wealth of new details about Lennon’s troubled childhood in Liverpool—abandoned by his father, he was turned over by his mother to an aunt, who raised him—that provides telling insight into his sometimes idiosyncratic later behavior. Once Lennon meets Paul McCartney in 1957, the book becomes perforce a Beatles biography, but even then Norman uncovers fascinating particulars about the band’s early gigs, especially their baptism by fire in the seedy clubs of Hamburg. Norman dutifully records Lennon’s post-Beatles career after the group’s breakup, but not even his exhaustive research and interviews with the musician’s associates, including widow Yoko Ono and their son, Sean, can freshen such well-trod ground very much. Nonetheless, fans should welcome Norman’s work, as complete an accounting of Lennon’s eventful and influential life as we’re ever likely to get. --Gordon Flagg --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.