Volume 35, Number 20 · December 22, 1988
Beatlephobia
By Luc Sante
The Lives of John Lennon
by Albert Goldman
William Morrow, 719 pp., $22.95
John Lennon, My Brother
by Julia Baird, by Geoffrey Giuliano, foreword by Paul McCartney
Henry Holt, 156 pp., $18.95
Imagine: John Lennon
written and edited by Andrew Solt, by Sam Egan, foreword by Yoko Ono, preface by David L. Wolper
Macmillan/Sarah Lazin Books, 255 pp., $39.95
Imagine: John Lennon
a film directed by Andrew Solt
Yesterday: The Unauthorized Biography of Paul McCartney
by Chet Flippo
Doubleday, 400 pp., $18.95
The Lennon Companion: Twenty-five Years of Comment
edited by Elizabeth Thomson, edited by David Gutman
Schirmer Books, 273 pp., $19.95
Tell Me Why: A Beatles Commentary
by Tim Riley
Knopf, 423 pp., $19.95
Twenty-five years ago the Beatles were hardly more than a rumor in the United States; an album and two singles had been issued on the VeeJay label, but with little publicity and less effect. Twenty years ago, in spite of the impending release of their eponymous two-record set, a k a 'The White Album,' the group had already begun proceedings in its protracted breakup. The period in between those points is currently being dissected, fictionalized, marketed under the trade name The Sixties, but the more it is invoked the fuzzier it becomes in memory and in representation. The Beatles, who now enjoy a free-associative link with that period as firm as that of the butter with the bread or the fly with the ointment, suffer from a similar prevailing loss of focus on the part of nearly everyone in the audience. They were either a lounge act or the Second Coming, no one is sure which.
Review, 6092 words
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