John Lennon: The Life: A definitive biography exploring Lennon's Beatles years, Aunt Mimi, Yoko Ono, and creative rebirth beyond fame

This is one great biography. Seriously. For one thing, it is very well-written. Mr. Norman brings to life the early Liverpool years, the Beatlemania period, and his final decade of activism mixed with domesticity. His writing is clear, often elegant and frequently plain hilarious. There are dozens "turns-of-phrase" that'll having you grinning and sometimes flat-out laughing sprinkled throughout the book...I got the feeling he was being influenced by Lennon's own legendary humor. I felt like I got a clear picture of the man John Lennon. In fact, the parts of Lennon that were not so attractive are what add to the three-dimensionality of my impression. He is presented in all his prickly, thorny beauty. This is not all just "the good parts" nor is it a one-sided Goldman-esque vitriolic spew. It feels complete. There are myths that are cleanly debunked, his good-natured, sweet side is on full display and yet his treatment of first wife Cynthia and son Julian are among the numerous aspects of his character that will make you wince a little while reading. He's no angel. I knew a lot about John Lennon. I now know a LOT more. I've read pretty much all of the essential Beatle books, and this is now, without hesitation, one of them. If I have a quibble, it's that the last period of Lennon's life gets the short end of the stick when compared to the pre-Beatles and Beatles sections. However, if you know about Norman's first Beatle book, "Shout", (which stoked my nascent Beatle fervor when it was originally released over 20 years ago), then this is not surprising. He's just better at that stuff. But it's still a fascinating section...I just wanted more, and that is not necessarily a bad thing, is it? I have to say that as I was nearing the end of this thick tome, I felt an acceleration. The only thing I can compare it to, and this is morbid as hell, is that crescendo roar before a plane crashes into the ground. I knew this horrible ending was coming...it was one of those thing, for me, where I will always remember where I was when I heard...yet I was still irrationally hoping for some different ending. I couldn't stop reading...I inhaled the last 100 pages without blinking and barely breathing. I was involved in this terrific life, and the book proper ends, with a wrenching jolt. There is no reportage of the aftermath; of the reactions, of the tributes. However, there is an epilogue of heart-breaking poignancy. It's a conversation with Sean Lennon. I read those last pages through tears, the presence of which surprised me. He was five when his dad died. My son is five now. That may have had something to do with my reaction; big deal. I used to like John Lennon. I love this guy now and his absence, for me, is all that much greater. The things he would have done, said, sung, been...this book will make you think.

Fifteen years ago, in the nascent stages of my Beatles super-fandom, I read Philip Norman's band biography Shout!. I didn't much like it. While it was readable and imprinted the band's basic career arc into my head, I balked at Norrman's snide tone and his questionable musical judgment, which seemed biased against every Beatle who wasn't John Lennon. Even worse, while Norman got the facts right, he provided almost no sense of who John, Paul, George, and Ringo were as people. Shout! was the story of four caricatures, some music they made, and lots of business dealings. All of this is to say that I approached Norman's biography of John Lennon with skepticism. Looking back, some of it was warranted. Norman can still be judgmental, with nary a good word to say about George Harrison; and he retains some odd opinions about pop culture. To his credit, he's changed his view of Paul McCartney, no longer holding it against him that he isn't John Lennon. Despite Norman's shortcomings and quirks, I finished the book impressed with his improvement as a biographer. And whatever the book's flaws, I devoured it with the same eager enthusiasm that I normally reserve for detective novels and television shows. I still disagree with some of his music criticism, but at least he's realized in the last 30 years that "Can't Buy Me Love" is a good song. Maybe in another decade or two, he'll even come around to the merits of George Harrison. Sadly, in the service of telling a zippy and engaging tale, Norman leaves out many of the details - as well as a bibliography and even footnotes - that might have marked a major work of scholarship. Consequently, we're often left with a gauzy view of John's adventures, jumping from Greatest Hit to Greatest Hit, lucky that John happened to have 800 pages' worth of them. This is particularly maddening when Norman gives short shrift to some of the more significant figures in John's life. In particular, we learn almost nothing about John's first wife Cynthia and his son Julian. Yes, John was a neglectful husband and father; but as Cynthia's excellent autobiography illustrated, there's a story to tell about that side of John's life. May Pang is similarly dispensed with, as are Pete Shotton and the myriad assistants who shared John's life at the Dakota. Sometimes the lack of detail even frustrates Norman's narrative. It's never made fully clear why Yoko sent John on his early-seventies "lost weekend"; or what caused him to settle down so definitively in the last five years of his life. Things just happen, quite entertainingly, and then other things happen, and on and on. Norman relies on a small number of sources, but to his credit, he goes deep with them - especially Yoko Ono, who provides invaluable insight into her husband, and whose own complex story is respectfully related. One of Norman's most interesting finds is a teenage girl who struck up a correspondence with John's Aunt Mimi, whose letters provide a unique perspective on our hero. Still, it's hard not to wonder what a biographer with the commitment of Mark Lewisohn might do with John's story - especially given that Lewisohn's magisterial Tune In managed to be both dense and compulsively readable. The details of John Lennon's life matter, and one day they will hopefully fill heavier books than this one. At the same time, Norman managed to paint as vivid a picture of John Lennon as I've ever come across. The star of Norman's story shines brightly from beginning to end, thanks to stories from his friends, his own quotes, and the author's own deft insights into what made him tick. We see John at his charming best, and at his violent, destructive worst. We see a deadbeat father whose music made millions happy, and a fickle political activist whose whose enthusiasm inspired countless good works. We see a controlling, all-consuming narcissist who brought introspection and lacerating honesty to popular music, and whose piercing takes on himself led so many people to better understand themselves. Norman shows us an angry young man who, at one point or another, viciously and needlessly alienated everybody who loved him; and a magnetic personality whose charm and energy drew them all back, again and again. Perhaps most importantly, Norman makes clear that John Lennon was one of the most fascinating public figures of the twentieth century. Impressively, he does this by stepping back and letting John's life speak for itself, with a minimum of editorializing. When John was cut down, Yoko, Sean, Julian, and John's fellow Beatles lost an irreplaceable figure in their lives; and, perhaps most frustratingly, John himself lost the peaceful, happy, and stable future he'd spent his last few years fighting to build. But it was always John's gift to reach further and move as many people as he could; and most of us have indeed been affected by his life and music. Norman's evocative book makes it clearer than ever how much we all lost that night in 1980.

It may be the music, it may be the age, but no performers captivated the world quite like the Beatles through the 1960's. Not surprisingly, the library of literature about the quartet and its extended family is immense [Cynthia Lennon, John's first wife, has published two autobiographies herself], and the canon of Beatle writing ranges from the brilliant to the awful. This reader was floored by Bob Spitz's "The Beatles" in 2006 and equally taken with our work at hand, Philip Norman's "John Lennon." Norman's 1980 work "Shout" has been considered the authoritative work on the group, and though I personally give that nod to Spitz, it is intriguing to see Norman's new treatment of John Lennon. Norman's biography is exquisitely detailed, though as other reviewers have noted, it does not have a professional bibliography aside from citations in the text itself. The author depends heavily upon both recorded interviews and conversation with living witnesses, of whom a fair number [Paul McCartney, George Martin, and Yoko Ono, among others] still survive. Norman keeps his text lively despite the fact that some of these living sources are recalling events of forty years or more distance, and certainly in retrospect. Most readers, I assume, know something of the outline of John Lennon's life. Norman strives to introduce the man to present and future generations in his time, as well as to tie together the continuing loose ends of the Lennon saga. Norman thus treats extensively of Lennon's natural parents, neither of whom has fared well in the transmission of the Beatles tradition. In particular, Norman seems to make special effort at a rehabilitation of Lennon's father, Alfred or "Freddy," with the son holding serve at the time of his murder. Norman appears to find something of Lennon's reckless behavior and chronic anger in "abandonment issues," but nothing in this work changed my mind that Lennon's primary adult difficulty was substance abuse [poly-substance abuse, to be more correct, and this work strengthened my conviction.] Yoko Ono, for all her own baggage, at least recognized this fact and tried to move him in the direction of better living. By his young adult years Lennon was writing and singing to his own pathology. His great fortune, to be sure, was his collaboration with Paul McCartney and George Martin, both of whom harnessed his intensity and rage into the energized and harmonized product we celebrate today. Norman's treatment of Martin is expansive: the Beatles' producer has come down to us over time as the buttoned down man of classical music who swallowed hard and tackled this most unusual studio challenge. Norman loosens the conductor's tie; Martin is depicted here as unflappable through thick and thin, carrying on his work enthusiastically even with Yoko Ono propped up on a bed beside him like Madame Lafarge. Martin came to enjoy the innovation of the successive Beatles' albums and threw himself into the fledgling science of sound technology and special effect, sometimes at the danger of his own job. It is regrettable that after 1966 Lennon never quite connected with McCartney and Martin on a vision for the future. By late 1965 the Beatles were in general agreement that their touring days were over and that they would henceforth work as a studio band, to the beat of their six month album deadlines for recording giant EMI. McCartney, with Martin's support, began to rethink the concept of long-play albums. Even though Beatles' albums generally carried an artistic/thematic trademark, McCartney saw the traditional LP as a grab bag of a dozen independent songs of varying style and quality. His thinking took him into the realm of the unified album, something along the lines of what would later emerge as "Tommy" and its cohorts in the 1970's. Lennon, however, entered a phase of significant breakdown, even by his standards. He would meet his obligation of the six month album, though his contributions were erratic and egocentric. The rest of his time was devoted to significant drug use and other offbeat personal pursuit with fellow substance abusers Bob Dylan and later Harry Nilsson. Coming up for air from times to time, he immersed himself in the trendy and opportunistic world of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who at least planted seeds for a more humanitarian, if not a more reality based, John Lennon. However, his new relationship with Yoko Ono in 1967 came to dominate Lennon's musical and personal affairs in ways that have drawn the wrath of many Beatles' fans. Their relationship was a battle for control tempered by pathological need. By the late 1960's, with Lennon generally absent, the other three Beatles were cultivating individual success: Harrison became a splendid performer/composer in his own right, and the affable Starr found himself in the movies, among other ventures. Manager Brian Epstein, whatever his faults, might not have been fully appreciated by the Beatles until his sudden death in 1967. Lennon, at least, realized this if dimly; advice from his new guru Ono resulted in Apple Corporation, a TARP, if you will, for struggling musicians, an operation rife with abuse and misplaced do-gooder-ism that significantly drained Beatle cash flow and proved to be a of limited success. Despite Apple's demise, Lennon was still considerably wealthy when the Beatles dissolved in 1970. Norman divides the final decade of Lennon's life as half "lost-weekend" and half "house husband." With the birth of his son Sean in 1975 Lennon found a new focus for his compulsive energies--child raising. Norman includes a post script, a curious interview with the late Lennon's son. [Julian evidently declined participation, a statement in itself.] After an idyllic description of his impressions, Sean remarks casually that he required emergency room treatment to his ears after an episode of his father's screaming at him about table manners. It occurred to me that young Sean had captured his father very well, like the hundreds of adults [and Julian] who passed through his life: nothing the man did would surprise anyone

For the biography, as usual, it is important to distinguish the life from the merit of the writing. Author Philip Norman is a fan of The Beatles and to a lesser extent John Lennon’s work with Yoko Ono. He comments on songs down to the minute, or at least day, during which they were written, and takes extra joy out of connecting lyrics to puns and real life events. This detailing highlights Lennon’s personality, even though based on his broken home and based on the childish appeal of early Beatles pop songs, many of the “I Want To Hold Your Hand” standards would not have ulterior meaning. Norman is perhaps the biggest Beatles fan, but if Lennon is the topic, it is perfectly acceptable to worship him subliminally and from a safe distance, while discussing the inevitability of groupie exploitation, legendary selfishness, unacceptable temper, alcoholism, and his incredible vulnerability to trends. Based on the full circle of his subject’s maturation, Norman is able to tell-all without fear of staining a legacy or screaming his love from the front row. The five post “lost weekend” years make this possible, and had they not been lived in the first place, the life would not have made the biography such a sign of textured redemption and humility. Without Lennon, the book has to be a who’s who. Brian Epstein was the manager whose death at 32 would lead to all the wrangling about the catalogue of songs in the 1980s. For so important a figure in the “black and white” years, his death is just a headline and a subsequent financial void. With Lennon, Epstein is one example of his roughneck political incorrectness, the first real glimpse of the honesty that makes people uncomfortable. Phil Spector is here in the same role, supervisor of production so artistically schooled his artistic sensibilities become clouded by his otherwise insensibility. He lived behind barbed wire and bodyguards, and always tends to do more than he says. The pages of this book would not help Spector sway a jury during a murder trial. Ringo Starr is by far the most level-headed, cooperative and helpful person, always content to craft a line in someone else’s song and play it as it was written. George Harrison, it must be noted, is a poor man’s Brian Jones, whose death is never in the book but whose musical talent, in Norman’s opinion, is the one to match Lennon’s. Billy Joel is the one famous musician who was watching Ed Sullivan in February, 1964. As it turns out, Lennon would someday become the distant admirer of “Just the Way You Are” and yell from Long Island Sound, “Billy, I have all your records!” Norman has no qualms about painting the female clothes on J. Edgar Hoover with almost every reference, and calls him a transvestite. Nixon is a stern but temporary obstacle, not an enemy so much as a politician looking to mobilize on an issue during the Vietnam War; his re-election actually meant leaving Lennon alone. Harry Nilsson is the enabling alcoholic and musical soul-mate in Los Angeles, the inadvertent victim of Lennon’s reckless influence. I can find no connection to Yoko Ono worth building into the larger Lennon message. The author cites himself as being accused of being “anti-Paul” but never says the same about her. He does not show her in gratuitously bad light or anybody unfairly, accept possibly Hoover. There is but one legitimate excuse for her wrecking the timeline and persona of the most influential band in history, and that is the claim, made by both husband and wife, that she could not have fallen for John the Beatle, since she was so abstractly artistic and culturally isolated that she had missed the whole Beatles craze. Part of my disgust comes from the acquainted fact that she missed the craze because she had been too old for it, seven years to be exact. Aunt Mimi was most likely never reconciled to this above all else. Julian and Cynthia Lennon are low points in his narrative, over and over again. He was not a bad husband and father for several years to them both but much worse. John Lennon treated his family like they were fans in the front row, screaming and mindless nuisances who were blocking his attempts to be a real artist. Of course the marriage and divorce could be understood, but the manner in which he introduced the end of their lives together looks much more like Pete Townsend’s version of how Eric Clapton stole Patty Boyd from Harrison: too much LSD, sitting yogi style on the floor, free love, and pseudo-transcendence. This leaves Paul McCartney, who, despite being almost as likable as Ringo Starr, is not as interesting and proved to be nowhere near the songwriter as John Lennon . After Revolver and Rubber Soul I couldn’t help but notice, or confirm, that the “Paul songs” were the ones I had naturally just wanted to skip when I first started listening in high school to greatest hits tapes. I am infatuated with the concept that “Yesterday” was a song he woke up with, convinced it was derivative until people he played it for told him that it was indeed not a rip-off. “Eleanor Rigby” is a Paul song that had a Lennon title, based on an old otherwise anonymous headstone. “Hey Jude” was “Hey Jules,” one written after consoling Cynthia for John’s ultimate callousness, the highpoint for McCartney in the book but ultimately not a top-tier song or level of artistic complexity. “The Long and Winding Road” isn’t in the book. “Paperback Writer” is, and again connected to Lennon based on some foreshadowing childhood, or perhaps Quarrymen, reference point. Wings perturbed Lennon, and solo McCartney evidently perturbed everybody, the bouncing but sad puppy dog eyes grown stale for a lot of people who didn’t want their father singing to them. Nevertheless, Paul was nicer to Yoko than John was to Linda Eastman. This can be, perhaps, attributed to the dark emotions and the dark memories intrinsic to John, all part of his larger and more widely varying artistic stamp. His insecurities are what ultimately endear him to so many. When people asked, “Are you going to get back together,” as the book details was more likely after financial hatchets had been buried in 1974, everybody telling Paul he was correct about management and Allen Klein, they wanted to see “the other three” reunited with John Lennon. In fact, Lennon’s turmoils, ideas, voice, persona, and emotional output are alone equal to that of three other people. “Dear Prudence” was written in India to Mia Farrow’s little sister. Elvis had remote control in 1964 and was holding a bass, disappointingly, when he met the group. Keith Richards’ name is misspelled more times, many times, than it is correctly spelled with the “s”. Mick Jagger and Marrianne Faithful don’t make anything more interesting to read. Norman speculates that Stu Sutcliffe may have died as a result of kicks to the head from John Lennon’s boot. Based on the antics of Julia Lennon, sexual and otherwise, and her suppression of the real Alf/Freddie Lennon, without music John Lennon could have turned into Mark David Chapman. But there was Aunt Mimi, giving him the tools to play Buddy Holly.

Plenty of detail on John's life. I am a long time Beatles fan, but still learned a lot. There is a lot of information. Then why giving only three stars? Well, Philip Norman, the author, is famous for diminishing the role of Paul McCartney in the Beatles. He said that John was three quarters of the Beatles - which is very unfair to Paul, George and Ringo. Throughout the book he puts plenty of quite derrogatory remartks to Paul that are totally uncalled for. He has also included quite a few gossip remarks. One example is suggesting that Stu Sutcliff's death could have been caused by a fight with John.That is based on a remark from a Stu's relative, years after his death, which is not confirmed by Paul, Astrid, or any of the other guys. It is there just to include a polemic topic. Throughout the book he keeps suggesting a homo affective relation between John and Stu, that do not resonate with any of John's, Paul's, Astrid or anybody else's accounts. He does not provide much detail or comments on the music either. One particularly silly comment, describing Abbey Road, is saying that Oh! Darling is a particularly unmemorable song (once again to downplay Paul). Well the proof that he is wrong is someone who was born after The Beatles disbanded (me) still be hearing and enjoying that very song, right? It is memorable that long afterwards. At this point you're probably asking why I am still giving it three stars, right? There is some good reasons for that. The author does a good job in portraying a scenario of all John's life phases and what was happening in England and in the world. He provides lots of details and facts. My criticism is that you need to take everything with a grain of salt. Don't have this book as your only source of information. Read other stuff from John and about him, to have a more balanced view. And don't listen to the author when he writes about Paul. Too much unjustified bickering. John was certainly my favourite Beatle, but I believe that the true power of The Beatles was that those FOUR guys challenged themselves to put out the world's best music ever. So many years passed and I still listen to them constantly. Read the book, but beware of the author bias.

Great read for Beatles fans. Good insight of John's life and a new perspective of his thoughts.

Lots of details, some of them entirely new to me and likely to be to any regular Beatles fan. Competently written but not as energetic as the author's prior Beatles book. Enfatuation with detail remains, the sometimes envious but always enthralled tone of his prior work is gone. "The Life" is decently paced, interesting, follows chronology but appears to have limited resources (John's 'lost weekend' lasted a year and a half and I think its description covered only 10 pages in this book... getting Nilson to scream himself hoarse and thus ruin his career isn't covered, the many women John slept with while 'on a break' with Yoko aren't detailed any more than to list the one that was assigned as his designated lover (a Ms. May) by Yoko). I was surprised to learn so much more about Yoko, like that she was a classically trained musician and heiress of a famous Japanese art/banking line before meeting John (but which she had broken from prior to meeting him). Her expressing herself in Beatles' recording sessions, onerous as that must have been for the rest of the band, appear to have been informed by more than mere whim. The fact that John had been an aspiring artist, real artist artist with turtleneck and a broad reading list and crazy friends, before his occasional band got good helps to explain partly why he left the Beatles for the actively avant garde Yoko... I think he was well on his way to being an acid casualty too and his plunge into symbiosis with her certainly saved him from the worst of that. Its strange to realize that John was already a married man, already on his way to being a father before he showed up anywhere on TV in chirpy lad mode. This book is heavy with info on his youth, about which I'd only read dribs and drabs here and there before. The last chapter, apparently distilled from an interview with John's son, was surprising and very moving.

In JOHN LENNON: THE LIFE, Author Philip Norman has complied possibly the most complete, concise, honest and forthright biography of the late John Lennon to date. And it saddens me that Yoko couldn't bring herself to endorse it because, as she said, "He was mean to John." That may be the most telling aspect of the whole ordeal. For, if anything, it was John himself who was most mean to John - and nearly everyone else. Even the most casual Beatles fan knows that. And Yoko was, in many ways, his facilitator. In others, the mother figure he never truly experienced. Nonetheless, from his early childhood to Quarry Bank, to Beatlemania and well beyond - until the day of his tragic murder - Philip Norman covers it all in exacting detail, straight from the mouths of John Lennon's family, friends, and closest confidants. And all the names and footnotes are laid out for all the whole to see. So, to that end I say, "Bravo Mr. Norman!" You've taken on one of the most beloved and controversial figures of the 20th Century, laid him bare, raised him up, praised him where deserving, and - not really criticized - but shown us all just how complicated, confused and conflicted this self proclaimed "Working Class Hero" could be. In doing so you've painted a picture of a man with parental & authority issues, who never quite grew up, yet managed to reach heights never before scaled by anyone in his chosen profession. A man full of insecurities and paranoia. A drug addict. Sex addict. And God only knows what else. And yet he managed to author some of the most endearing, inspiring, tender, and meaningful songs of his time. And despite all his flaws, bared to the world for decades now, he remains beloved by untold millions still. You've taken the story of this complicated man, and told it in a straightforward, unapologetic fashion. Told his story, good, bad and otherwise - warts & glory - in a manner easy for anyone to understand and relate to. And done a fine job of it sir. And John Lennon fans everywhere (this one included) are forever in your debt.

un merveille - même pour quelqu'un qui pensais de connaître l'histoire de la vie de Lennon - je ne connaissais pas - les details sont surprenants et il est très bien écrit

This book seems in my opinion like a great and true book about johns life it tell everything perfect anf all the story’s and everything, it’s just sweet sad and also funny in some way. Perfect book for perfect Lennon fans!

John Lennon was a great composer and a decent musician, but he was quite a difficult person. This book helped me understand his complex character. This biography is very well documented and written. I highly recommend it to any serious Beatles fans.

Livro muitíssimo importante para conhecer sobre a vida desse estupendo artista.

Quick and easy to buy but received Book and it's fairly weathered. Not in new condition at all. Disappointing