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John Lennon: The Life

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Do we need another biography on John Lennon? Yes. Why? Because the two most popular ones are the hatchet job that Albert Goldman did and Ray Coleman's fine biography that didn't quite capture the essence of who Lennon was and was hamstrung by trying to undo the damage of Goldman's book. The other question we need to ask is if there are any new facts about Lennon's life that make this worthwhile (and considering that Norman covered part of Lennon's life in his Beatles book SHOUT!). Yes--Norman digs up new facts both good and bad. He doesn't turn these new bits of info salacious or sensational comments or observations providing them with a context to help us understand Lennon as a human being.

Philip Norman has tackled one of the most difficult subjects for a biography because Lennon's life was well covered by the press and fostered a lot of myths himself. With access to Yoko Ono, Freddie Lennon's biography (and unpublished papers), Sean Lennon, Paul McCartney (via email) and others, Norman has prepared a biography that is fair balanced and presents his contradictory character thorughout his life--his bravado as well as his insecurities (of which there were many).

Fans that have read other Beatles books or Lennon biographies should be aware that the bulk of the book covers Lennon's pre-Beatles life and his time in the band throughout most of the 800 plus pages of the book. Norman does revisit familiar ground simply because they are essential events and there are those that haven't read ANY books on Lennon but he also introduces a lot of new information as well.

There are a few flaws because we are, after all, only human. There's no bibliography or discography for Lennon (although fans may be aware of the latter the former is important)although he usually cites his sources in the book. Nevertheless, Norman has written a nearly perfect (there are a few minor flaws that crept past those that reviewed the text)biography on Lennon in terms of the facts and the various opinions that knew him best. The book devotes too little in terms of Lennon's post-Beatles career and "The Lost Weekend" that he experienced when he broke up with Yoko. It also skimps over the recording sessions for "Double Fantasy" (where Yoko reportedly fought so much with Lennon during the sessions that co-producer Jack Douglas often scheduled them to work on their tracks at different times). Norman has his opinions as well and doesn't hesitate to let the reader know them. You may disagree with his opinions(I did on some) but he at least provides us with why be believes them.

Recommended.

Most beloved public figures have many facets -- some of them nasty, some of them pleasant and admirable. Most biographies either focus on the good, or the bad.

But fortunately, Philip Norman is making a valiant effort to show, if not all of John Lennon's facets, then as many of them as possible. Having explored the Beatles and their impact on a generation, Norman narrows his focus down to "John Lennon: The Life" -- and he does a superb job unearthing the many details, relationships and differing faces of this much-lamented rock star. We'll never get a John Lennon autobiography, but Norman does a pretty good job of getting inside his shaggy head.

John Lennon was born into an incredibly stormy marriage (which broke up soon after) and raised by his loving, strict Aunt Mimi, though he was something of a hellraising trickster as a child. The one blot: the tragic, shocking death of his mother Julia.

Of course, everyone knows what happened later -- after a brief stint at art school, Lennon became part of a band with an ever-shifting name, and started working on pop songs alongside Paul McCartney. Though briefly devastated by the death of a bandmate, Lennon quickly rose to fame and fortune when the renamed Beatles became not just a hit band, but a new way of life for the youth of Britain, and then the entire world. Hit album after hit album poured from the Beatles, along with the usual rock-star intake of drugs, sex and occasional PR disasters.

But Lennon's interests began to stray in more spiritual directions, and as his marriage to the sweet-natured Cynthia fell apart, he met and fell in love with eccentric Japanese artist Yoko Ono. Suddenly he was devoting himself not to pop hits, but to experimental numbers, "bed-ins" and sitting in bags, and using his world-wide celebrity for the furtherance of peace. While this lifestyle didn't quite tame Lennon's wild side, it led to new focuses in his life -- until it was tragically cut short.

You have to hand it to Philip Norman. While most biographers tend to portray Lennon as a hippie saint or a hopeless jerk, he tries very hard to find a happy medium that encompasses all of Lennon's personality: a flawed man who had a boatload of issues and could be both cruel and kind. While he gets a bit worshipy in the latter parts of Lennon's life, Norman does a pretty good portraying both the musician and those around him in a realistic, compelling light.

Additionally, Norman gives as much careful attention to Lennon's youth as he does to the Beatlemania and John/Yoko years -- in particular, his relationships to his mother, Aunt Mimi, Paul McCartney and the delicate artist Stu, as well as the months and years as a struggling young musician. There's lots of pop psychology, but it works.

In he meantime, Lennon's life is carefully framed in the political and social climes of the time -- the post-war fifties, colourful psychedelic chaos of the 1960s, and the later, grimmer times of the Vietnam War. Politicians, pop art, Liverpudlian slang and changing societies are all explored in detail, and Norman has the perspectives of a lot of people who actually lived in the time and knew Lennon -- his wives, his sons, his bandmates, and even his Aunt Mimi (and she gets a LOT of words in).

He also injects a wry sense of humour into the story (Lennon's aunts turning up at a Beatles performance) as well as a steady, sometimes evocative writing style ("The room reeked of stale beer and wine, and was lined in dusty velvet drapes..."). At the same time, there's some pretty shocking allegations here, such as the claim that Lennon may have been inadvertently involved in the death of his bandmate, but Norman avoids tabloid journalism by explaining why he doubts Lennon actually did any of that.

Lennon himself is a colourful mosaic of seemingly contradictory qualities -- he could be mean-spirited (mocking the disabled), wild, kindly, romantic, neglectful, vibrant, brilliantly unconventional and craving a spirituality that's hard to get when you're filthy rich. As seen by Norman, much of his personality seems to be based on the fear of loved ones dying and leaving him, but we get glimpses of dozens of different sides to his psyche.

"John Lennon: The Life" attempts to accurately portray one of the twentieth century's most unconventional and beloved pop stars, and for the most part, Philip Norman does a brilliant job.

Forever romanticized by his tragic and puzzling murder, John Lennon has ascended to almost god-like status in pop culture. Remembered as the visionary and dreamer who soundtracked a generation, Lennon's legacy has largely been sculpted by those who loved and admired him, as his strengths, accomplishments and inspirations shine for all to see, while his flaws and failures have been forgotten. Philip Norman believes twenty-eight years of mourning-inspired deification seems about right, and with this book, he attempts to paint a more accurate picture of the man.

The artist Norman depicts has a lot in common with the popular description of a rockstar. The poet who sang about love never missed a chance to cheat on his women, and the man who championed brotherhood and neighborly living often strong-armed and bullied his friends. Norman shows us that he never let people forget that he was John Lennon and they weren't.

His book, however, is not a hatchet-job. Intertwined with his attempts to revise the pedestalized legacy of Lennon is a thorough, faithful account of the intimate and defining moments of a life that led to a canon of music unequaled in artistic merit and inspiration. Norman's intent was to show his readers both the sour and the sweet.

He achieves his goal in part with impressive, exclusive interaction with Yoko One, Paul McCartney, Producer George Martin and others. To those interviews, Norman adds research and his own conjecture and formulates theories about Lennon's mother's death and (what is sure to be the focus of much of this book's publicity) questions about whether Lennon harbored any homosexual tendencies/curiosities.

Norman's success is creating an account of an irresistible human being who has less in common with an Olympian figure than he does with the people who will be flipping through the book's pages. With that achievement, he has probably created the first genuine biography of the man who history has transformed into a mythic figure lacking authenticity and humanity.

It's not until the very end of this very long book that the reader discovers an interesting fact: Yoko Ono does not endorse Philip Norman's book. Why? Because, the author writes, his book is seen by Ono as being "mean to John". How odd! It's certainly well understood by many fans that John Lennon was Not a saint. He had many dark elements to his personality, as well as the lighter ones: humor, intelligence, talent and compassion. Philip Norman does a fair job presenting Lennon's flaws, as well as his many gifts. (For me, the best part of the book is when Paul McCartney explains how he and John were more alike, than not. At last, a rather stupid myth: John being the "genius" and Paul being the "light one", can receive a much more complex - and satifying - analysis. John's "genius" received a ton of help from McCartney and the other Beatles - and also from George Martin's musical genius and ability, as well).
In this book, it's really Yoko Ono, herself, who Norman paints as one-sided - in the positive sense, mainly. One can, of course, sympathize with Ono's trials by fire. It's through this book that I learned the concrete details of the anti-Yoko sentiment rabidly at play in the late 60's, (such as fans mean-spiritly thrusting yellow roses - thorn side out - into Ono's hands - the color of the Roses a racist comment on Ono's backround). Such disgraceful and hateful cruelty is not something that Ono deserved then, or now. That's not even a question to consider.
At this point, any fair-minded person can easily detect how Ono truly helped Lennon. Yet, it's also glaringly obvious how overly dependent Lennon was upon her. John Lennon was a damaged, wounded, very insecure man. The irony of John throwing barbs at Paul for McCartney's sappy "muzack" truly loses much of the intended sting when one considers all the love-sick songs that Lennon wrote (and/or Preached) about Ono. The better ones are, in fact, really quite beautiful. Yet, a vast many of them show how Lennon worshipped Yoko Ono's views as THE TRUTH, bar None. This over-heated dependency came from a man who was forced to learn, quite early, that he could never have "Mummy". This area of crucial loss which Lennon went through is one that Norman writes about with depth and honesty. He shows, in great detail, the devastation to Lennon's psyche, from age four onwards, over the crucial, cruel Double-loss of his mother. Unfortunately, Norman is far too respectful (and careful) around Ono, later on, when it's time to tie in this early loss to Lennon's later neediness of Yoko Ono as his one true center and (alternate) religion. Perhaps Norman needed to be timid around Ono, to get her cooperation.
Yoko Ono has gone from being a figure that everyone hates into a woman that No one must ever dare to view with anything short of John's complete awe. One cannot blame John Lennon for falling in love with Yoko Ono, but we do not need to join in this deifying of Ono that he espoused, during his life. In the Playboy Interviews, given shortly before his tragic death, Lennon speaks of Ono as this flawless Goddess of Truth & Reality. Lennon's view of Ono is part of the Grand Mythology he fostered in his lifetime. It's time to take a more unsparing look at this myth, without hating Yoko.
May Pang, in her book, Loving John, presents a far more complex picture of Lennon and Ono, as does Cynthia Lennon, in her two books. Philip Norman neglects to give either Pang or Cynthia Lennon much credit, though. He dismisses both of them far too easily than their importance in Lennon's life merits. He even writes off poor Julian. Sean's memories of his Dad, at the book's end, are interesting and important. Still, when Sean Taro ("firstborn" in Japanese, we learn - yet, one more way for John to try to deny Julian) Lennon starts talking about the "intensity" of his father, and this intensity making the Beatles a group that were more than just "sugary", this reader knows that Sean, too, has fallen sway to the Great Ono Myth: that She, Yoko - and Not the Beatles, nor even John Lennon, himself - was/is the True Artistic Genius. Regrettably, Philip Norman's book gives deference to this crazy bit of nonsense a bit too much, as well.

This is an impressively fact-filled book that details practically everything you'd ever want to know about John Lennon's life. Admittedly, I knew very little about Lennon prior to reading it, and what attracted me to the book in the first place was a newspaper review that talked about Lennon's not-so-admirable qualities, which shocked me because I always thought he was a peace-loving gentleman who had few enemies in his time. So based on the review of the book, I plunged into Lennon's story with the new viewpoint that he was a spoiled and heartless guy who plowed through life in a decadent and selfish way -- and those characteristics were actually true during parts of his life. But what I also discovered is that the guy was human, capable of maturation, thug-like behavior, insecurity, verbal impulsiveness, addiction, weirdness, artistic creativity, depression, sensitivity, possessiveness, generousness and complete outlandishness when the various moods struck. I won't delve in to how Yoko Ono affected all this, but needless to say, her influence was prominent later on in his life, and it usually wasn't for the worse in my opinion. In fact, I came away from this book actually liking and admiring Yoko.

Being one of the most famous guys to ever walk the Earth would inevitably warp anybody, but thankfully, as aptly conveyed by Norman, Lennon really turned his life around by his mid-30s. After a mind-boggling series of sour Beatle business dealings, way too many drugs and countless efforts to promote peace with Yoko, Lennon eventually became more of a reclusive "house husband," got sober, learned to sail a yacht and made a parting album, "Double History." In short, he seemed to be loving life and chock-full of creative energy before being tragically shot Dec. 8, 1980.

Regarding the Beatles, what's most sad to me is how the business side of the band's empire eventually crash landed with a vengeance. It gets complicated, and it's all explained in the book, but things like band management, money issues and creative differences rather swiftly caused the Beatles' all-too-soon demise. I actually came away feeling a bit sorry for Paul McCartney through the whole sordid process, though like Lennon, McCartney apparently had his moments of megalomania as well.

To me, the flawed portions of Norman's book occur when he's describing the meaning behind Lennon's body of musical work. Oftentimes, he simply relies on snippets of Lennon's lyrics and nothing more, so you feel like you're reading a parade of John's words with nothing behind them to drive the particular points home. Additionally, I was disappointed Norman didn't delve a little deeper into the quality of the early live performances by the Quarry Men, Lennon's band prior to the Beatles. Otherwise, besides several editing errors, this is first-rate work by Norman and a joy to read if you want to know more about Lennon and the Beatles.

One thing's for sure, Lennon lived an unbelievingly full life in 40 wild years. And it's no exaggeration to say he was a creative genius who possessed the singing voice of an angel. Strangely, it seems like that's the one thing Lennon never gets enough credit for -- his great voice and how it massively influenced so many other musicians, even to the present day.

At over 800 pages, Norman's book has the look and feel of "definitive." Unfortunately, it isn't. The only part that is remotely comprehensive is the pre-superstardom period, which occupies more than a third of the book. Not surprisingly, this is by far the most compelling section of the narrative.

The Beatle years that follow have almost nothing that has not been seen in dozens of other books. I note that Norman provides NO END NOTES or BIBLIOGRAPHY, probably to camouflage how little original research he actually did. Nevertheless, he provides a serviceable but unspectacular overview of John's Beatle period.

Unfortunately, the narrative begins to flounder with the introduction of Yoko Ono in 1967. It appears that in exchange for interview access, Norman agreed to treat her with kid gloves throughout. Perhaps Ono has been vilified excessively in previous works but Norman bends too far in the other direction. Over and over, he uncritically accepts every questionable statement/explanation made by Ono. In fact, he seems almost oblivious that that Yoko, of course, has her own agenda, and a good biographer needs to balance this fact with opposing views.

His handling of the solo years is particularly bad. May Pang's influence on John is completely marginalized, although Larry Kane's book (LENNON REVEALED) quotes Lennon as saying that he "really loved May." There is also nothing about Lennon's interest in writing with Paul McCartney in 1974, documented not only by Pang but also Paul Simon, with whom Lennon informally discussed the plan.

Norman's chapters on the Dakota years are also weak. Once again, he almost exclusively relies on three sources: Ono, the sycophantic and unreliable Elliot Mintz, and Bob Gruen, another Ono pal. Not surprisingly, they present the same whitewashed view of Lennon as a happy, comfortable, drug-free, bread-baking, doting father and househusband. Norman, however, ignores facts that don't fit into this sanitized view. Ron Wood's recent autobiography, for example, tells a story of Lennon and Ono showing up at the Stones' hotel room in New York in 1978. After dispatching Ono to the corner, Lennon happily partook of some of Keith Richards' heroin stash and then spent the day goofing off in a studio with the Stones before the drug kicked in.

In short, this is far from the definitive Lennon biography. Perhaps after Ono dies or if John's diaries ever materialize (though doubtful), we may get a more honest account. Otherwise, skip this one.

Coming from the perspective of a life-long Beatles fan who's read a lot of material on them...

The most entertaining and informative portion of the book deals with John's formative years, even up to just before the Beatles hit it big in the UK. I'd wager even hardcore fans will find something new here.

As the book progresses, I'm reminded of writing a term paper for school. You know how it starts out with tremendous enthusiasm and detail and then you start running out of steam and just have to get the thing finished? The last ten years or so of John's life seem rushed through.

Like other readers, I was curious about the overly positive treatment Yoko Ono received - until I got to the part where Norman acknowledges that he was writing the book under the auspices of getting Yoko's endorsement. So that explains that.

Unlike some other readers, I don't believe John is painted in a terrible light. I think we're past the point where we think he was something other than a brilliant but flawed human being.

While I understand it's not a picture book, the biography would have greatly benefited from a better selection of photos. In particular of the peripheral people mentioned (Robert Freeman's wife for example).

My biggest problem was with two errors that caught my attention. First, Norman mixes up Ed Sullivan and Jack Parr's networks (CBS & NBC respectively). Second (and far worse) Norman closes out a chapter discussing John's add-libbing at the end of "All You Need Is Love". Any half-baked Beatles fan knows it's Paul doing the add-libbing - you can see it in the video for goodness sake. This might seem like nit-picking but when I pick up on errors such as these I can't help but wonder what else was gotten wrong.

Finally, whatever the publisher is paying their proofreaders it's too much. Holy smoke the amount of spelling errors...

If you're new to the world of John Lennon/the Beatles this will get you started - but take it all with a grain of salt.

Finally I finish the ambitious John Lennon biography. Philip Norman has accomplished an amazing feat, and I recommend this book to anyone interested in John Lennon, Beatles history, or rock-n-roll history for that matter. Yoko Ono has accused Norman's biography of being "mean to John." Norman relays the facts of John's without judgment, and the facts just happen to show a flawed, complicated individual who could be apathetic to those closest to him while benevolent to complete strangers.

John could be cruel. The eventual "man of peace" had a short, often violent temper, especially when drinking. He could be overtly callous toward the physically handicapped, homosexuals, and was in no doubt negligent of his first son, Julian, and his first wife, Cynthia. Cynthia knew she had been "replaced" when she came home from vacation and found Yoko Ono meditating in her living room, slippers placed neatly outside John and Cynthia's bedroom door. (The scene, I think, is strangely reminiscent of Simon and Garfunkel's "Cecilia.")

John's early years are fascinating. Raised in Liverpool by his prickly Aunt Mimi, John was loved by all of his family, yet seemingly discarded by his own parents. His relationship with his mother was odd; she was a free-spirit who left his father for a man John never warmed up to. She never remarried, even after giving birth to two other children. This was a social taboo that horrified John's austere aunt Mimi, and she contrived to give him a proper, moral upbringing. Despite her efforts, the rebellious John candidly relayed his own sexual attraction for his mother to several different sources. Julia Lennon was unexpectedly killed when he was just seventeen.

The Beatle years read fast. The beginning of the end for the band seems to come not when Yoko came into John's life, but when the band decided to stop touring after John's infamous statement "the Beatles are more popular than Jesus." As the Queen of England stated, the Beatles "got a little funny," venturing off to India to spend time with a famous Hindu guru and spending a lot of time tripping on acid. Soon after their stay abroad, Brian Epstein, the manager and great friend who helped catapult the Beatles to stardom, died of a drug overdose. After that, it was only a matter of time before the Beatles infrastructure would fall apart.

Philip Norman is extremely generous in his portrayal of Yoko Ono. John comes across as the one who forced Yoko into the lives of the others, who were (for quite a while) extremely tolerant of her sudden presence in every aspect of the Beatles' lives together. Paul McCartney also comes off as incredibly patient with Yoko, even offering her the option to direct a forthcoming Beatles movie. She took offense to the offer and turned it down. John, however, had no patience whatsoever for Linda McCartney, and he and Paul began to feud... the rest is history.

Afterwards, it was John and Yoko, with exception of "the Lost Weekend" where John was essentially kicked out his Manhattan apartment for a year. The post-Beatle years show us John's incredible vulnerability and need for something greater than fame and fortune in his life, something greater than the Beatles, music, and drugs. He formed the Plastic Ono Band, retreated to California for "Primal Scream Therapy," fought for a United States Visa, and deferred to his wife as she obsessively planned their life around astrological and numerological signs. John reconciled with the father he believed abandoned him only to lash out in one of his notorious fits of rage and became estranged from him once again.

A bit of peace seemed to have found him after the birth of his second son, Sean Lennon. Julian became more regularly involved in family activities and John took up sailing. No longer creating or recording music himself, he kept up with the music industry, feeling pangs of jealousy as he watched stars such as Elton John energetically captivate large crowds. Following a long respite, John started recording again, and in a blink of an eye was taken from the world by a crazed fan. Norman honors John's life by giving his assassin no more than a couple of paragraphs. The biography abruptly ends after Lennon's death. Appropriately the last words of the biography are not Norman's, but Sean Lennon's, describing vague memories of the man who adored him.

Norman has done an admirable job depicting John Lennon's fascinating life story. My one major complaint is the obvious absence of Paul's profound influence on Lennon's life. A more in-depth look at their relationship should have been included. The author manages to provide us with a sense of what Ringo and George meant to John, but Paul is always in the peripheral, occasionally pissing John off. Norman himself states that John's two great partners in life were Paul and Yoko. You wouldn't know it from the 600 plus pages preceding that statement.

One ends the book realizing its subject was a man who made some serious errors in judgment. However, he almost always found a way to reconcile himself to those he mistreated. Those who knew him well valued his friendship immensely. He was eager to be a help to his friends and contributed to Ringo and George's post-Beatles records. He opened his home to the less fortunate and used his fame to speak out against the atrocities of war. (Norman seems to enjoy demonstrating some of the ridiculousness of the peace movement; although England never went to Vietnam, the hippies searched in vain for something to protest about. They ended up protesting their country's lack of position on the matter. And of course one finds it hard to take Lennon's "Imagine" seriously when his wife had a refrigerated room designated for her fur coat collection.) Lennon, and I don't say this tritely, meant well. And he was a musical genius. And he loved with abandon. And he was after all (to quote Ferris) the walrus.
Coo-coo-ca-choo.

I don't know enough about Lennon to judge the accuracy of this book, but I have to comment on the stupendously bad writing. If people played drinking games with books, for this one, I'd suggest drinking at every gratuitous reference to the Penny Lane roundabout. Equally annoying are the frequent clumsy attempts at foreshadowing: every mention of violence, guns, death, or the Dakota becomes an ominous sign pointing to Lennon's murder. Norman is also given to exaggerating Lennon's importance to the point of absurdity. The anti-war protesters of the 1960s act "as if in step with John's peace campaign," and Woodstock is "a giant response to the crusade [Lennon] and Yoko had launched from bed." "Give Peace a Chance" is comparable to the greatest lines written by Shakespeare. "Happy Christmas (War is Over)" has become "as much a part of the Yuletide ritual as turkey or mistletoe." Other examples of bad writing abound. Norman refers to events as ironic but apparently doesn't fully understand what the word means. He describes George Harrison's "My Sweet Lord" as "an anthem crossing all religious boundaries, from 'Hare Krishna' to 'Hallelujah,'" when in fact it simply uses both of those phrases. Sometimes I found myself laughing at Norman's writing. Other times, I was so irritated I almost quit reading altogether. I hope a better writer will pursue this subject soon.

It's pretty strange to think we've reached the point where one can point to changing historical perspectives on Aunt Mimi and Brian Epstein just as readily as those on any president or statesman. The Walrus himself would probably disapprove - certainly the man Philip Norman profiles here would. But let's face it, the Beatles really were that historically important, and John's story is the most dramatic for a number of reasons. All of which is a long way of saying, yes, it's worth reading yet another Lennon biography no matter how much you already know about the man.

Norman's portrait of a deeply troubled genius is not radically different from past works, but there are a couple of major departures here. Besides the larger scope of Norman's study, two big differences stand out. The first of these is the sheer depths of Lennon's depravity at certain points in his life. While Norman's overall tone is far less caustic than it was in his earlier book, "Shout!", many of the stories he uncovers are salacious and unflattering even by the standards of what was already known about Lennon. His thoughtlessness and occasional cruelty towards those he loved are shown to be even worse than you have probably read elsewhere, and Norman is far less willing than most other biographers to excuse Lennon on the grounds of his difficult childhood (though he does acknowledge this). Even the sincerity of some of his greatest work is occasionally called into question: a particularly sad anecdote pops up late in the book in which Lennon griped about his extremely expensive lifestyle. When a friend responded with his own beloved lyrics - "Imagine no possessions" - Lennon snapped, "It's only a bloody song!" Even Lennon's sacred relationship with his mother is tainted by an extremely discomfiting incident shortly before her death, which apparently haunted John until his own death. To Norman's credit, he does what he can to debunk some less-than-substantiated rumors about Lennon's "lost weekend" in Los Angeles, about which the truth is already pretty unflattering.

The second major difference is Norman's perspective on various friends and family whom you might think you know pretty well by now. For starters, Norman is deferential to a fault to John's famously stern Aunt Mimi, in stark contrast to Cynthia Lennon's portrayal in her 2005 book. Reading between the lines, it is clear enough that she did as least as much harm as good to her nephew in his formative years. But Norman doesn't seem willing to acknowledge that outright for some reason, making for perhaps the only major flaw in the book. (I, for one, am inclined to believe Cyn in any case; after all, she knew and lived with Mimi.) A bigger surprise is his remarkably sympathetic profile of Alfred "Freddie" Lennon. Where other works (including Norman's own) have invariably portrayed John's father as an irresponsible neer-do-well, he comes across here as irresponsible but well-intentioned, and something of a victim of unfair treatment by John's mother and aunts (and, late in life, John himself). Finally, Brian Epstein comes across as an even more tragic figure than we thought. Norman tries, but doesn't quite succeed, to put to rest the rumor of a romantic encounter between Lennon and Epstein on their 1963 trip to Spain. It appears John's own accounts of the trip were somewhat contradictory, so this might be the closest we ever get to a straight answer.

The overall story is one you probably know quite well by now. But Norman does bring a new appreciation to what was already out there, and he also fills in some of the blanks with some very impressive research. As the author of what he arrogantly but correctly calls "the definitive book on the Beatles," one might expect him to deliver the definitive book on the man he once called "three quarters of the Beatles," and he did it.