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For more than a quarter century, Philip Norman's internationally bestselling Shout! has been unchallenged as the definitive biography of the Beatles. Now, at last, Norman turns his formidable talent to the Beatle for whom belonging to the world's most beloved pop group was never enough. Drawing on pre-viously untapped sources, and with unprecedented access to all the major characters, here is the comprehensive and most revealing portrait of John Lennon that is ever likely to be published.
This masterly biography takes a fresh and penetrating look at every aspect of Lennon's much-chronicled life, including the songs that have turned him, posthumously, into a nearsecular saint. In three years of research, Norman has turned up an extra-ordinary amount of new information about even the best-known episodes of Lennon folklore—his upbringing by his strict Aunt Mimi; his allegedly wasted school and student days; the evolution of his peerless creative partnership with Paul McCartney; his Beatle-busting love affair with a Japanese performance artist; his forays into painting and literature; his experiments with Transcendental Meditation, primal scream therapy, and drugs. The book's numerous key informants and interviewees include Sir Paul McCartney, Sir George Martin, Sean Lennon—whose moving reminiscence reveals his father as never before—and Yoko Ono, who speaks with sometimes shocking candor about the inner workings of her marriage to John.
Honest and unflinching, as John himself would wish, Norman gives us the whole man in all his endless contradictions—tough and cynical, hilariously funny but also naive, vulnerable and insecure—and reveals how the mother who gave him away as a toddler haunted his mind and his music for the rest of his days.
Graeme Malcolm does an excellent job reading Norman's studious biography of the most beloved Beatle. Beginning with Lennon's parents' roots in working-class Liverpool, and continuing through his enormous success as part of the world's most popular band and as a solo artist, Norman's biography covers all the bases of an already-well-thumbed life. Malcolm does a particularly superb job of capturing the inimitable Liverpudlian accents of the Fab Four, and Lennon in particular. Stately, but studded with flashes of good humor and a storyteller's sensibility for rhythm, Malcolm's reading is good enough to keep listeners hooked, as if they were listening to "I Want to Hold Your Hand," or "Let It Be." An Ecco hardcover (Reviews, July 7). (Nov.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. 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, LJ6/15/08.]
—Douglas King
John Lennon: The Life
Chapter One
War Baby
I was never really wanted.
John Lennon was born with a gift for music and comedy that would carry him further from his roots than he ever dreamed possible. As a young man, he was lured away from the British Isles by the seemingly boundless glamour and opportunity to be found across the Atlantic. He achieved that rare feat for a British performer of taking American music to the Americans and playing it as convincingly as any homegrown practitioner, or even more so. For several years, his group toured the country, delighting audiences in city after city with their garish suits, funny hair, and contagiously happy grins.
This, of course, was not Beatle John Lennon but his namesake paternal grandfather, more commonly known as Jack, born in 1855. Lennon is an Irish surname...from O'Leannain or O'Lonain...and Jack habitually gave his birthplace as Dublin, though there is evidence that his family had already crossed the Irish Sea to become part of Liverpool's extensive Hibernian community some time previously. He began his working life as a clerk, but in the 1880s followed a common impulse among his compatriots and emigrated to New York. Whereas the city turned other immigrant Irishmen into laborers or police officers, Jack wound up as a member of Andrew Roberton's Colored Operatic Kentucky Minstrels.
However brief or casual his involvement, this made him part of the first transatlantic popular music industry. American minstrel troupes, in which white men blackened their faces, put on outsize collars and stripey pantaloons, and sang sentimental choruses about the SwaneeRiver, "coons," and "darkies," were hugely popular in the late nineteenth century, both as performers and creators of hit songs. When Roberton's Colored Operatic Kentucky Minstrels toured Ireland in 1897, the Limerick Chronicle called them "the world's acknowledged masters of refined minstrelsy," while the Dublin Chronicle thought them the best it had ever seen. A contemporary handbook records that the troupe was about thirty-strong, that it featured some genuinely black artistes among the cosmetic ones, and that it made a specialty of parading through the streets of every town where it was to appear.
For this John Lennon, unlike the grandson he would never see, music did not bring worldwide fame but was merely an exotic interlude, most details of which were never known to his descendants. Around the turn of the century, he came off the road for good, returned to Liverpool, and resumed his old life as a clerk, this time with the Booth shipping line. With him came his daughter, Mary, only child of a first marriage that had not survived his temporary immersion in burnt-cork makeup, banjo music, and applause.
When Mary left him to work in domestic service, a solitary old age seemed in prospect for Jack. His remedy was to marry his housekeeper, a young Liverpool Irishwoman with the happily coincidental name of Mary Maguire. Although twenty years his junior, and illiterate, Mary...better known as Polly...proved an ideal Victorian wife, practical, hardworking, and selfless. Their home was a tiny terrace house in Copperfield Street, Toxteth, a part of the city nicknamed "Dickens Land," so numerous were the streets named after Dickens characters. Rather like Mr. Micawber in David Copperfield, Jack sometimes talked about returning to his former life as a minstrel and earning fortunes enough for his young wife, as he put it, to be "farting against silk." But from here on, his music making would be confined to local pubs and his own family circle.
Jack's marriage to Polly gave him a second family of eight children. Two died in infancy, a fact that the superstitious Polly attributed to their Catholic baptism. The next six therefore received Protestant christenings, and all survived: five boys, George, Herbert, Sydney, Alfred, and Charles, and a girl, Edith. Polly did a heroic job of feeding them all on Jack's modest wage. But their diet of mainly bread, margarine, strong tea, and lobscouse...a meat-and-biscuit stew from which Liverpudlians acquired the nickname Scouses...was chronically lacking in essential nutrients. This had its worst effect on the fourth boy, Alfred, born in 1912, who as a toddler developed rickets that stunted the growth of his legs. The only remedy known to pediatrics in those days was to encase both of them in iron braces, hoping the ponderous extra weight would promote growth and strength. Despite years burdened by the braces, Alf's legs remained puny and foreshortened, and he failed to grow any taller than five feet four inches. He was, even so, a good-looking lad, with luxuriant dark hair, merry eyes, and the distinctive Lennon family nose, a thin, plunging beak with sharply defined clefts over the nostrils.
Jack's musical talents were passed on to his children in varying measure. George, Herbert, Sydney, Charles, and Edith all had passable singing voices, and the boys played mouth organ, the only instrument young people in their circumstances could afford. Alf, however, showed ability of an altogether higher order, allied to what his brother Charlie (born in 1918) called "that show-off spirit." He could sing all the music-hall and light operatic songs that made up the World War I hit parade; he could recite ballads, tell jokes, and do impressions. His specialty was Charlie Chaplin, the anarchic little tramp whose film comedies had created the unprecedented phenomenon of an entertainer famous all over the world. At family gatherings, Alf would sit on his father's knee in his Tiny Tim leg irons, and the two would sing "Ave Maria" together, with sentimental tears streaming down their faces.
Jack died from liver disease, probably caused by alcoholism, in 1921. Unable to survive on the state widow's allowance of five shillings per child per week, Polly had no choice but to take in washing. It meant backbreaking, hand-scalding work from four a.m. to dusk, scrubbing other people's soiled linen on a washboard, then squeezing out the sodden coils through a heavy iron mangle. Even so, as her granddaughter Joyce Lennon remembers, the cramped little house remained always spotless with "floors you could eat your dinner from," the kitchen range cleaned with graphite religiously every Monday morning, the front step scoured almost white, then edged in red with a chip of sandstone. Polly ruled her five sons like Mrs. Joe in Great Expectations, not hesitating to chastise them with a leather strap even when they were nearly grown men. Like many Liverpudlians of the most down-to-earth kind, she had her mystical side, believing herself a psychic, able to read the future in spread-out playing cards or the pattern of tea leaves in an empty cup.
John Lennon: The Life. Copyright © by Philip Norman. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.Anonymous
Posted January 14, 2009
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This is basically a copy and paste effort, and there were a lot of grammatical errors, which I found distracting.
May Pang's influence on John should not have been underestimated (Elliot Mintz, Yoko's lackey, recalled that Pang never attained the status of being Lennon's old lady). She may not have, but she succeeded in getting Lennon and Julian together to "come together" in what could have been a very meaningful father/first born son relationship. I'm sure that she was glossed over since Yoko had input and I was very sure this would happen. A shame. According to May and very believably so, via dated pictures, she was a part of John's life for a long time.
For any avid Beatles fan, this was nothing that we did not already know.
I was disappointed.
2 out of 3 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Gary_Scott
Posted December 1, 2008
It is a shame that this is the third full Lennon bio to have appeared, simply because it is superb and I fear some potential readers may pass this one over. Philip Norman does what few Lennon/Beatles biographers manage to, he digs into the interior of this complex and interesting soul and provides an exhaustive and multi-dimensional view of the man. I am walking away from this wonderful bio [a very easy read] feeling as if I finally "know" this man I've admired for so long.
Norman seems very sensitive and insightful, and he manages to thoughtfully connect-[some]-dots of Lennon's lifetime in a way I've not encountered before. Normally the childhood & early years of a bio are ones I simply skim over; here, these chapters lay an essential foundation for the life that is to be explored. The author does a fabulous job of fleshing out Lennon's early familial years and bringing that post-war era Liverpool to life ... he does the same with the Hamburg years. Both of these are relatively under-explored and one-dimensional periods of the usual Lennon bio. What I like most about this book is that, while the Beatle years are certainly well-explored, this isn't a bio of "Beatle John." Rather, the man takes center stage while the Beatles and their music are presented as simply a part of an overall life.
There are a few areas skimped over or under-explored, however. The leap from Cavern Club regulars to global stars seems to happen suddenly, without much explanation or exploration. Likewise, I missed any seed-planting related to John's massive leap from "semi-violent Beatle John" to "hippy peace activist." That transformation is just presented without motivation or explanation. I also feel that the Dakota years are relatively under-explored, which is a shame given Yoko & Sean's participation in the project.
All in all, I would highly recommend this title for anyone remotely interested in Lennon and/or the Beatles. I'm not sure John Lennon will ever be fully understood even by those closest to him during his lifetime, but this intimate portrait brings us as close to him as we're likely to get. It truly is a wonderful book.
1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Posted February 27, 2011
human face to a complex, brilliant icon
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.popoTW
Posted September 23, 2009
Book Review Outline
Book title and author: John Lennon the Life by Phillip Norman
Title of review: Greatest biography in the world
Number of stars (1 to 5): 5
Introduction
It is a biography about the life of John Lennon and his family. This book would be great for people who want to learn more about John Lennon.
Description and summary of main points
The author is a great writer and has written many books including biographies on the Beatles. I think it's terrific how he put the book together. The main point of the book is to tell you about the life of the singer and song writer John Lennon.
Evaluation
I think the book gives a lot of information about him and I think the author did a lot of research to be able to find out what he was like and what happened to him as a kid. In the book it says a lot about his personal life and what he was thinking about when some of the events that occurred when he was living were going on. The book really did let you know all about the life of John Lennon because it started with him as a young child and ended when he was killed. I think that it's a lot better than other biographies about John Lennon.
Conclusion
The book has lots of great information for the reader. The author did a really did a great job with getting information about the book. The book really helps with learning about John Lennon.
Your final review
I think that this is the single greatest biography about John Lennon in the world. I also think that the author is one of the best authors in the world. The author must have been researching on this book for years.
Book Review Outline
Book title and author: John Lennon the Life by Phillip Norman
Title of review: Greatest biography in the world
Number of stars (1 to 5): 5
Introduction
It is a biography about the life of John Lennon and his family. This book would be great for people who want to learn more about John Lennon.
Description and summary of main points
The author is a great writer and has written many books including biographies on the Beatles. I think it's terrific how he put the book together. The main point of the book is to tell you about the life of the singer and song writer John Lennon.
Evaluation
I think the book gives a lot of information about him and I think the author did a lot of research to be able to find out what he was like and what happened to him as a kid. In the book it says a lot about his personal life and what he was thinking about when some of the events that occurred when he was living were going on. The book really did let you know all about the life of John Lennon because it started with him as a young child and ended when he was killed. I think that it's a lot better than other biographies about John Lennon.
Conclusion
The book has lots of great information for the reader. The author did a really did a great job with getting information about the book. The book really helps with learning about John Lennon.
Your final review
I think that this is the single greatest biography about John Lennon in the world. I also think that the author is one of the best authors in the world. The author must have been researching on this book for years.
Book Review Outline
Book title and author: John Lennon the Life by Phillip Norman
Title of review: Greatest biography in the world
Number of stars (1 to 5): 5
Introduction
It is a biography about the life of John Lennon and his family. This book would be great
babsb
Posted June 13, 2009
I Also Recommend:
This book was absolutely filled with information about the great John Lennon. It told so much about his childhood and the road to the Beatles as we knew them. I would have liked a little more personal information about his life with Cynthia, and felt that his life with Yoko was a little glossed over. All in all it is THE book to read to know John Lennon as the genius and the flawed human being who didn't always do right by people. RECOMMENDED!
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Julieronetta
Posted May 3, 2009
No hold barred describing the characters involved. Very interesting comparisons of how the groups are viewed in England as compared to American idol status. A real education of how a groups can become a sensation or die on the vine. A real "can't put down" book.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Shazza
Posted February 18, 2009
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I have read a few other Lennon books but I did find this one to be well rounded and quite absorbing as I read it on holiday. It is a good "gift giving" book and is full of info that fans would like.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Anonymous
Posted January 21, 2009
If you are an avid beatle or john lennon fan , there is nothing new to read here. I think everything that could be written about the beatles or john lennon has already been done. If you are not familure with the beatles or lennon then you have all the info you need here 800 plus pages full
0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Posted November 22, 2008
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John lennon, is the best! Can't wait to read this book. I like to think I've kept the torch going. My first book published this year. Am recommending John Lennon, by Philip Norman and Light at the End of My Pen, by John D. Perez
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Overview
For more than a quarter century, Philip Norman's internationally bestselling Shout! has been unchallenged as the definitive biography of the Beatles. Now, at last, Norman turns his formidable talent to the Beatle for whom belonging to the world's most beloved pop group was never enough. Drawing on pre-viously untapped sources, and with unprecedented access to all the major characters, here is the comprehensive and most revealing portrait of John Lennon that is ever likely to be published.
This masterly biography takes a fresh and penetrating look at every aspect of Lennon's much-chronicled life, including the songs that have turned him, posthumously, ...