His entry begins:I'm a non-fiction obsessive. My favorite books from the past season include Adam Gopnik's Angels and Ages, a joyride comparing Lincoln with Darwin.About Lennon: The Man, the Myth, the Music, from the publisher:
I also admired Peter...[read on]
In his commanding new book, the eminent NPR critic Tim Riley takes us on the remarkable journey that brought a Liverpool art student from a disastrous childhood to the highest realms of fame.Learn more about the book and author at Tim Riley's website.
Riley portrays Lennon’s rise from Hamburg’s red light district to Britain’s Royal Variety Show; from the charmed naiveté of “Love Me Do” to the soaring ambivalence of “Don’t Let Me Down”; from his shotgun marriage to Cynthia Powell in 1962 to his epic media romance with Yoko Ono. Written with the critical insight and stylistic mastery readers have come to expect from Riley,this richly textured narrative draws on numerous new and exclusive interviews with Lennon’s friends, enemies, confidantes, and associates; lost memoirs written by relatives and friends; as well as previously undiscovered City of Liverpool records. Riley explores Lennon in all of his contradictions: the British art student who universalized an American style, the anarchic rock ’n’ roller with the moral spine, the anti-jazz snob who posed naked with his avant-garde lover, and the misogynist who became a househusband. What emerges is the enormous, seductive, and confounding personality that made Lennon a cultural touchstone.
In Lennon, Riley casts Lennon as a modernist hero in a sweeping epic, dramatizing rock history anew as Lennon himself might have experienced it.
Lennon: The Man, The Myth, The Music is on the Christian Science Monitor's list of the five best books on John Lennon.
My Book, The Movie: Lennon: The Man, the Myth, the Music.
Writers Read: Tim Riley.
--Marshal Zeringue
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