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Book Review: John Lennon: In His Life, new photo-biography

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John Lennon: In His Life from White Star Publishers is a new coffee-table style book featuring a pictorial look at John Lennon’s life. The biographical text is written by Beatles author, John Blaney, and there is a preface written by Yoko Ono Lennon.

The book starts off with a gorgeous array of photos from John Lennon’s childhood and teenage years. The large size of the book offers quality reproductions of Lennon’s birth certificate as well as color images of his boyhood writing and drawings from the “Daily Howl”. The quality and scale of the early photographs are reminiscent of the hardcover book from 1988 called Imagine: John Lennon, a companion to the John Lennon documentary of the same name.

The photos of The Beatles years in Hamburg are stunning and printed in high quality and a highlight of the book. The early years of Lennon’s career with The Beatles are given a thorough exploration in John Lennon: In His Life.
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However, as the years progress in Lennon’s life, the variety of pictures starts to decrease. The focus of the book is on Lennon’s Beatles years. Yoko doesn’t even enter the book’s timeline until page 182 out of 270 pages. That means the later years of Lennon’s life are not given the same amount of attention.
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The 1970s are only given 25 pages in the book, and shockingly, 1980 is represented with one page spread. With that last spread, the book ends abruptly with virtually no pictures of the last year of Lennon’s life.
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As a result, this book cannot be described as a complete look at John Lennon’s life. But if you are more interested in Lennon’s early years and his time with The Beatles, than you will enjoy this book.
–Trina Yannicos
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