For greater than 1 / 4 century, biographer Philip Norman’s the world over bestselling Shout! has been unchallenged because the definitive biography of the Beatles. Now, ultimately, Norman turns his ambitious skill to the Beatle for whom being a Beatle was once by no means sufficient. Drawing on prior to now untapped resources, and with remarkable get admission to to all of the prime characters, Norman items the great and so much revealing portrait of John Lennon ever printed.
This masterly biography takes a recent and penetrating take a look at each and every facet of Lennon’s so much-chronicled existence, together with the songs that experience became him, posthumously, right into a close to-secular saint. In 3 years of study, Norman has became up an bizarre quantity of latest details about even the most efficient-recognized episodes of Lennon folklore—his upbringing via his strict Aunt Mimi; his allegedly wasted college and scholar days; the evolution of his peerless inventive partnership with Paul McCartney; his Beatle-busting love affair with a Jap efficiency artist; his forays into portray and literature; his experiments with Transcendental Meditation, primal scream remedy, and medicine. The guide’s a lot of key informants and interviewees come with Sir Paul McCartney, Sir George Martin, Sean Lennon—whose shifting memory finds his father as by no means observed sooner than—and Yoko Ono, who speaks with every now and then stunning candor in regards to the internal workings of her marriage to John.
“[A] haunting, vast, awesome piece of labor.” –New York Instances
Honest and unflinching, as John himself would want, Norman offers us the entire guy in all his never-ending contradictions—difficult and cynical, hilariously humorous but in addition naive, inclined and insecure—and divulges how the mum who gave him away as a child haunted his thoughts and his song for the remainder of his days.
