Who was John Lennon?
When is enough too much? That’s the question raised by Philip Norman’s “John Lennon: The Life,” an oversized biography of the man who gave the Beatles their bite. Beginning well before his birth — the opening sequence describes another John Lennon, the singer’s paternal grandfather, who emigrated from Liverpool to New York in the 1880s and became a touring musician, performing in blackface with Andrew Roberton’s Colored Operatic Kentucky Minstrels– and ending with the gunshots that killed him, on Dec. 8, 1980, this is a panoramic effort, exhaustively detailed and researched. If biography were an art of collection, Norman’s book would be a stately portrait, obsessively completist, every brush stroke in place. But biography is an art of interpretation, and too often this book lacks a sense of context — not just in regard to music but also to the way that, perhaps more for Lennon than any other figure of his moment, pop culture and history came to intersect. Who was Lennon really, afte
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