John Lennon

The Life

By: Philip Norman

Narrated by: Graeme Malcolm

Length: 12 hrs and 52 mins

Publisher's summary

Philip Norman turns his formidable talent to the Beatle for whom belonging to the world's most beloved pop group was never enough. Drawing on previously untapped sources, and with unprecedented access to all the major characters, here is the definitive portrait of John Lennon.

This biography takes a fresh and penetrating look at Lennon's much-chronicled life, including the songs that have turned him, posthumously, into almost a secular saint. In three years of research, Norman has turned up an extraordinary amount of new information about even the best-known episodes of Lennon folklore. The book's numerous key informants and interviewees include Sir Paul McCartney, Sir George Martin, 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. He reveals how the mother who gave him away as a toddler haunted his mind and his music for the rest of his days.

©2008 Philip Norman (P)2008 HarperCollins Publishers

Expected Better

Norman's McCartney book was excellent. This one jumped around a bit. The last two Chapters were the best.

Reader was monotonous and feeble attempts at accents were terrible

Great book

Very sad ending. Well written. I would recommend this book to everyone, especially Beatle fans.

A must for hard core Beatles fans

The only thing that bothered me was a few times the story jumped in the time sequence out of the blue and skipped over pieces of his life that I thought would’ve been interesting. But the overall book , the very good delivery and the new info revealed
was worth still giving it five stars. 

Missing links

The book was good except it left out a couple of the major milestones of John Lennon's life. Without giving away the story, there are parts of the book I had to listen to again, thinking I missed something. Sadly, the author missed something more than once.

my view on John

super
detailed... sometimes lacked emotional content...explored stories behind the songs...interesting aspects of Lennen s thoughts

Great detail!

This biography is well done, it’s a great read for Beatles fans and newbies alike. The story always ends so fookin sad 😢…of people in this world to murder why him? What a waste!

John Lennon The Life

Phillip Norman has done another great job on a Legend. Very well researched and seems to be a very honest portrayal of a truly gifted artist.

What's there is good, but there isn't enough there

Why, oh why, does Audible provide unabridged versions of, say, a 3-volume history of the stapler yet insist on abridging books like this? The other commenters have it right: these are excerpts, not a real abridged version.

And the selections are puzzling: this version skips the entire first 3 albums, U.S. tour, etc., but gives in excruciating detail a long, Wikipedia-like history of LSD that is familiar from every 1960s documentary ever made. But John Lennon's life from 1974-1980? Missing.

The writing is good, as is the narration and the information provided. But you'll find yourself going back to see if you missed something because of inattention. You didn't. It isn't there.

Nobody told me it was abridged like these...

After listening to the McCartney bio by Philip Norman I was surprised how choppy this one was... a total lack of detail and holes in the story. Oh... turns out it was abridged. Though the word was never used in the description.

Great listen, bad abridgement

Like everyone else, I was very disappointed by the truly awful abridgement of this book. My favorite missing part (and there are so many good ones to choose from) is how the Beatles went from Christmas 1962 to full-blown rock stars in 1965. Uhmm... America and Ed Sullivan, anyone?