John Lennon: The Life
(Libby/OverDrive eBook, Kindle)

Starred Review. Norman (Shout!: The Beatles in Their Generation) offers a grand, comprehensive, yet sprightly biography of the late Beatle. His sympathetic but sharp treatment captures Lennon's charm and charisma, but also his cruelty to loved ones, his rebel posturings, his resentment of Paul McCartney's matchless songwriting powers and growing dominance of the band, his debaucheries, his drunk and disorderlies, his shoplifting and his Oedipal yearnings. Norman is a smart analyst of pop music and its cultural setting and a scintillating miniaturist of Beatlemania. (He likens the band's trademark shriek-inducing hair-shakings to manic feather-dusters.) He manages the difficult trick of loving Lennon's music without swooning over it, pronouncing Strawberry Fields both a great song and crafted druggy gibberish. Lennon emerges as a bright, troubled, insecure man who grasped at profundity and occasionally touched it; from Norman's portrait, we see why so many consider him a soul mate. Photos. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved All rights reserved.

This extensive, thoroughly researched biography traces the life of John Lennon, who, nearly 30 years after his murder, remains one of the most intriguing and respected figures in popular music. Novelist and biographer Norman, who recounted the story of the Beatles in Shout!, focuses here on Lennon's life outside his legendary band, with particular emphasis on his subject's tumultuous, unconventional childhood, his strange and sometimes shocking relationships with and attitudes toward his parents, and his two very different marriages. Lennon's treatment of his discarded first wife and long-suffering, seafaring father are examined in rich detail, shedding new light on his complex personality. Norman investigates both Lennon the public figure and, more interestingly, Lennon the private man, revealing a uniquely talented and influential artist and activist who suffered from sometimes debilitating insecurity and abandonment issues that haunted him throughout his life. Exclusive new commentary from Yoko Ono, Paul McCartney, and sundry confidants and family members provides fresh insight to this accessible albeit lengthy work of popular biography. A highly recommended addition to any public library's music or biography collection. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 6/15/08.]--Douglas King, Univ. of South Carolina Lib., Columbia (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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. Copyright 2008 Booklist Reviews.

This extensive, thoroughly researched biography traces the life of John Lennon, who, nearly 30 years after his murder, remains one of the most intriguing and respected figures in popular music. Novelist and biographer Norman, who recounted the story of the Beatles in Shout! , focuses here on Lennon's life outside his legendary band, with particular emphasis on his subject's tumultuous, unconventional childhood, his strange and sometimes shocking relationships with and attitudes toward his parents, and his two very different marriages. Lennon's treatment of his discarded first wife and long-suffering, seafaring father are examined in rich detail, shedding new light on his complex personality. Norman investigates both Lennon the public figure and, more interestingly, Lennon the private man, revealing a uniquely talented and influential artist and activist who suffered from sometimes debilitating insecurity and abandonment issues that haunted him throughout his life. Exclusive new commentary from Yoko Ono, Paul McCartney, and sundry confidants and family members provides fresh insight to this accessible albeit lengthy work of popular biography. A highly recommended addition to any public library's music or biography collection. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 6/15/08.]—Douglas King, Univ. of South Carolina Lib., Columbia

After Shout!, his renowned biography of the Beatles, Norman homes in on the band's most mythic member. Just when you think no new information about Lennon can be uncovered, Norman presents a respectful if warts-and-all portrayal using a torrent of details to re-create Lennon's spheres of experience. (LJ 8/08) Copyright 2008 Reed Business Information.