This book is the transcript of John Lennon's final interview. In the introduction to the book, Andy Peebles describes John as "the finest interviewee it has ever been my privilege to face".

This interview mostly covers John's solo work and his life after the Beatles. Mr. Peebles asks Lennon about virtually every solo album John did. He also asks about various individual songs from those albums. John talks about the various concerts he played without the Beatles. And he discusses work he did with other musicians, such as Mick Jagger, Elton John and David Bowie.

In the interview John does refer to Paul, George and Ringo. He also speaks of the childhoods of Julian and Sean. John mentions his personal assistant and future author Fred Seaman in this book.

John describes his troubles with the record companies. They didn't want to release some of his work because of the lyrics or album covers. Then he'd get shorted on the royalties. And on top of that some of his songs weren't given radio play because of controversial lyrics.

John says he was set up by the police when he was busted for drugs in England. And his criminal record in England caused him trouble for the rest of his life.

Regarding the Double Fantasy album John says all the songs came to him while he was in Bermuda. On that album he mostly used musicians he'd never worked with before.

Ironically, Andy Peebles' last question to John was about his personal security. John replies in effect that he feels safe and comfortable on the streets of New York. Unfortunately, that false sense of security proved fatal in the end.

This book shows that John Lennon in his final days was in good spirits. He was sharp, honest and insightful. He had numerous plans for the future. He was already planning and working on his next two albums when he died.

I like Yoko's early albums.I think she was a great artist at one time. But if what May Pang says in this book is factual, then Yoko Ono truly was a sick woman. Totally controlling, and totally after John Lennons money. After reading this book, I just wished John had stayed with May Pang. Who knows, things might have turned out a whole lot differently if he had.
Fascinating read for a Lennon fan.

I'm supposed to be writing a paper on the nature of consciousness, and I'm using this book as my main source for the philosophical side of things. It's very good for that sort of thing, being a reletivly condensed overview of the topic.

There are things about how this book was written, the way the info was obtained and the author's bizarre quest to "get inside" Lennon's head that are off-putting and tend to make me take this book with a heaping handful of sodium chloride. The author claims he has distilled the essence of the man's last year by allegedly analyzing Lennon's pilfered diaries, starving himself down to John Lennon's weight and chasing after former servants of the Lennons. I would say this book does give us a picture of a person who lived a very strange life but whether that person is or is not Lennon, really, who can say? It is an interesting picture. Certainly a disticnt perspective that diverges wildly from the domesticated, retiree superstar Lennon like to style himself as. So it's an interesting read but the author is trying painfully hard to show us how well he knew a man he never actually met. It smacks of wishful thinking. There's something about it that feels forced and kind of...fictional.

Even a dedicated Lennonphile who find new material in this well-written and poignantly sad examination of John's last year. The closer Rosen edges towards the assassination, the sadder and more wistful the reader feels. It's puzzling and amazing that an icon like Lennon was not very happy towards the end of his too-short life. The book brings out the numerous infidelities that marred the Lennon-Ono partnership, supposedly one of the greatest love stories of the era. Yoko comes off fairly well here, which is surprising considering the usually brutal treatment she receives at the hands of biographers.

Her manipulative nature is exemplified in Lennon's decision to include Yoko's pathetic musical material on his last album, "Double Fantasy," which was utterly compromised by having Yoko wail on every other track. Her control over Lennon's decision-making processes is detailed here and is sobering. It's frustrating that John relied upon Yoko so heavily in making professonal decisions when his musical career had benn nearly without parallel.

Ultimately this is an interesting and well-written book with few errors of fact and some new information (rare for any Beatles-related book). One of the most depressing nights of my life was when I heard John was killed, and this book brings back the anguish quite well. Twenty years later, all Lennon fans will eternally ask themselves how much more great music John had within him. Tragically, we will never know because of Mark David Chapman.

Numerous books and countless articles have been written about the Beatles and every single member of the group. Was there still a possibility left to discover new aspects of John Lennon's life? Didn't we know it all about the man that brought us songs like "Good Day Sunshine", "Imagine" and "Yellow Submarine"? The answer has to be no. Robert Rosen's new book "Nowhere Man. The final Days of John Lennon" portrays the former leader of the famous music quartet from a very different, unexplored viewpoint. Rosen focuses on Lennon's inner life, his private self that existed far away from the public eye. He portrays a man that was pushed back and forth between the disciplined life of a yogi and the more ordinary, worldly pleasures of an aging human being and celebrity who had lost touch with the world and himself. Like other depressed people Lennon's daily schedule was dominated by minor tasks and challenges that had become the center of his existence. His universe evolved around juice fasts, dream journals, his appearance and horoscopes. Long gone were the heights of creativity, no reading and no meditation could bring them back and smoking grass didn't help either. The John Lennon of the late seventies and early eighties observed New York from the windows of the Dakota: down there in Central Park the real life was happening, up in the rooms of the Dakota superstition and paranoia had taken over. We learn a lot from this book about how the Lennons lived, how they hired and fired their service people, how they raised there son, which books John read etc. But mostly we learn from these pages the story of a desperate man who thought he had nowhere to go anymore and who because his life was tragically taken from him never got a second chance to find out differently.

i was just lookin for a lennon book when i came across this book ive never read it i never will how the hell can some of u lot give this 5 stars? tha chapman done it for publicity and some of you are falling for it!even if your not lennon fans why are you so interested in this scum? ive heard he has posters on his prison wall saying i killed john lennon he is proud of it! and you silly people are interested in this killer? may i ask why?to read about him and to say his name is giving him the fame he wants dont do it!!and the authour if he thinks this is some sort of a good idea to give publicity to that scum well he is one <@!(* thank you.

It hurts me a bit to read that Chapman was a nice guy, appreciated for some of the things he did. A picture even shows him playing a "guitar during a meeting of his prayer group from the Chapel Woods Presbyterian Church in Decatur, Georgia." Someone who was six years old when Chapman shot John Lennon in 1980 would have been 18 in 1992, when this book was published, and decided to remain a nobody in American society, could have been 25 in 1999 and taken part in the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. A real nobody wouldn't have known that the bombs were falling on an embassy, and nobody would really be held responsible, either, because everybody wants to maintain their rights to be nobody. The frightening thing about this book is its consideration of options for anyone to be somebody in a global society which encompasses millions of people in the United States and billions in the world. There are pages in this book about drug use. Is this book the reason that so many more people in our prisons are serving time for drugs than back in 1980, when some people were surprised that John Lennon was shot?

It was entertaining and extremely informative. I really cannot say enough good things about this book. What I love is that most text in the book is dialogue taken from interviews with MD Chapman, and you really get a chance to know him through his words. Terrific. You see an emotional, logical, artistic, and human side of him.

I just finished throwing this book in the trash. I started noticing a trend in many of the articles - bash the Catholic Church. They blame some sinister church conspiracy for almost every strange happening that occurs. It seems that was their agenda in compiling this book.

I read this cover to cover and liked most every essay in it. I had heard about many of these conspiracies, but only in headline fashion. These articals dig deeper and give the reader insight as to where the various allegations arose from. It's easy to say "the CIA started AIDS" or this group or that group was responsible for funnelling crack cocaine into the ghetto, but here a reader can see the stories and logic surrounding the allogations. Some of the articals were a bit brief and the one concerning the Apocalypse seemed out of place, but the rest should serve as a good springboard by which enthusiasts can begin research of their own.

Al Hidell and Joan D'Arc are probably the hippest of the various conspiracy researchers and compilers.

Well I just woke up from a long nap after trying yet again to *yawn* read a chapter of this *yawn* book. Definitely not nearly enough bananas or geese in it for me. If you want to hear long drawn-out stories about getting files from government agencies....well all I'm saying is I guess my primary interest in Lennon has always been his music and I just don't give a hoot about this stuff-- not enough entertainment value. I thought the book "The day Elvis Met Nixon" was much better. Oh go ahead write me a negative response.

Chronicling the bizarre FBI/CIA fear & obsession with ex-Beatle rock legend John Lennon during the 70's,Jon Wiener gathers up the dossier files & informant reports(etc) that have been released under the Freedom of Information Act by both intelligence agencies concerning their interests & worries with the "dangerous extremist" Mr.Lennon & his THEN struggle for acceptance & a 'Green-Card' in the U.S.-(And all this manifesting from a minor marijuana conviction in 1968)-. Weiner pushed & leaned on the agencies for years to get the documents published(as had other biographers)& quite a number of them are blanked out for purposes of "National Security". It's a great book for "hard-core" Beatle fans & it's a comprehensive study on Govt. paranoia for future generations to bewilder at. Thumbs up!

First a simple test. To whom was FBI Director, J. Edgar Hoover referring when he wrote to President Nixon's Chief of Staff, H.R. Haldeman, "[He is]...a paradox because he is difficult to judge by the normal standards of civilized life....His main reason for being is to destroy, blindly and indiscriminately, to tear down and provoke chaos...."? Adolf Hitler maybe, or some seminal Osama bin-Laden? Of course not, as you already know it was none other than our friendly, pudgy-faced, mop-headed, evil genius, that heinous John Lennon, composer of such bellicose anthems as "Imagine" and "Give Peace a Chance." Reason enough to warrant the FBI's surveillance of the man for 24 hours a day, for years on end? Well, not really, but they did it anyway. This book details the efforts by the author, Jon Wiener, and two ACLU attorneys, Mark Rosenbaum and Dan Marmalefsky, to obtain the 200 odd pages of documents held by the FBI on Mr. Lennon, that the agency had refused to release, (typically on grounds of either national security or ostensibly to protect confidential sources). To this end the attorneys employed the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) as their basis to obtain these documents. The run-around that they were given by the government should be nothing new to students of previous such encounters, and the fact that it took 15 years to achieve it should not prove too surprising either. But without doubt the central point of this book, and one that cannot be overemphasized, is that it was the FBI (acting outside of its own charter and the explicit instructions contained in the FOIA) that violated the law, while finding no criminal activity on the part of Mr. Lennon. Possibly I'm too old, too jaded or just plain too cynical to be surprised to find out that the government, or its representatives, are capable of lying, placing illegal wire-taps, harassment, obfuscation and underhandedness. Certainly all of that happened here, and it is hats off to Rosenbaum and Marmalefsky for uncovering much of the skullduggery. Although most of the information on Mr. Lennon that was unearthed as a result of this effort was largely already known to any diligent reader of, for example, "Rolling Stone" magazine, following the trail of the hearings and legal arguments is a fascinating and worthwhile one, and the book's final chapter was (for me, at least) an eye-opener.

I've read numerous books on John Lennon and this ranks among the worst. It is just another cash-in rip-off in the line of Albert Goldman, Fred Seaman etc. Green wants to convince the reader he had a very close relationship with Lennon, could see inside his head, and pretends to remember their discussions accurately, word by word. He depicts Lennon and Ono as completely unbalanced, insecure, restless, child-like characters who never knew what they really wanted. And of course, the tarot-card reader Green was always there to give wise, fatherly advice so that those two poor creatures wouldn't have messed up their lives completely. If you really want to understand Lennon to the extent it is possible, I suggest you read Anthony Elliott's excellent psychological analysis "The Mourning of John Lennon".

Green's book is a little different from the others trying to "cash" in on Lennon. His account is a benign one that doesn't offer up startling negative images for the public to gulp down. It really reads as if he's just trying to relate his "memories" of John- memories which do not really say anything new- everything here Lennon has hinted at or said in interviews before his death. Also, Green admits it's a definitive portrait, that John could have acted totally different away from him. his biggest problem is that he uses extensive conversations in quotes that anyone knows he could not possibly have remembered, but even there, he says he doesn't say it's verbatim, he's just recreating an "essence" - so as long as you put all of that in the forefront of your mind while you read it- it's enjoyable- Lennon seems clever, funny, compelling, and as I said, there's nothing here that John hasn't already revealed about the way he was.

I'm not quite sure why previous reviews have been so low.
I have read many Lennon bios, Goldman, Seaman, May Pang, Ray Coleman, Giuliano.
I find that this bio is quite refreshing, in that John Green seems to be a person who did not yield before the 'John and Yoko' force...he seems to have held his own, and wasn't afraid to face up to them. It seems that Yoko was almost 'beholden' to Green, and that he was a person she (and John) would not try to beat down with her (their) relentless quirks. This is a clear and cleverly written account of John's last five or so years. There are intriguing accounts of Yoko's obsession with a South American witch (ending, in this book, with a kinda hysterical discussion of Yoko's wondering if she was signing a pact with the Devil, only to beg Green to sign his own name, to which he later replied, 'My name, Yoko? no, I signed YOUR name!').
Another account that stands out is John's visit to a 'new-age' (in 21st century terms, remember this was the early 70s) store, in search of proper ceremonial objects for his and Yoko's renewal of their wedding vows. John's sarcastic response to the store's solemn owners made me laugh out loud. I think Green did a very good job of showing Lennon's various sides...from the witty, sarcastic (public-loving) John, to the emotionally crippled, loner, stay-in-bed til I wither, side. The most revealing aspect of the book (and this can be confirmed by May Pang's book 'Loving John') is that Green kept trying to get John to really take responsibility for his life...he kept telling him that he could really do something, make music, be alive, if only he'd take responsibility for it. And, alas, it seems that John chose to wallow in paranoia and nothingness for too long...
all we have left is the legacy he left us when he started back to work in the early 80's...
all in all, this book is a definite must-read for Lennon fans who truly want to know what went on during the post 'Lost-Weekend' (a myth in itself, see May Pang's book) period.

This book is so poor, it does not even qulaify as "fun" garbage, as others have put it. I have over 2000 books and this will be only the 2nd book I will ever throw away to keep it from my library. Why? The scholarship is so bad, I simply cannot believe any of it. Let me give you some examples:

On page 89, the author writes, "Lennon's imaginary encounters ranged from rising star Madonna to the unlikely Barbara Walters, from Yoko's sister Setsuko to McCartney's kid sister Ruth." Madonna's first single was released in 1982, two years after Lennon DIED. The author even puts this quote in the chapter about 1975, a year before Madonnna finished High School in Michigan.

On Page 109, the author writes "During the 1969 filming of the Let It Be recording sessions, John made insinuating references to the drug, comparing heroin to sex by cracking, "Shooting is good exercise." In the book on the LET IT BE transcripts, it reveals that is YOKO who said this, NOT JOHN, and this is an example of the sloppy way the entire book is put together, seemingly without any effort to tell the truth.

The first chapter is so poorly put together, you realize immediately the author is going to put down anything negative about Lennon no matter what the circumstance and believe them all. There are huge blocks of conversations repeated in this book from friends of friends, ex-wives of groupies,etc. Let me try to get this across. The brain does not store whole conversations. Think of someone you talked to yesterday- now try to recreate the conversation exactly as it occurred, word by word. it's impossible, the brain does not record those things, it will record the essence of a conversation, maybe even a sentence or two, but not a word by word blow.

But this is what you get here- long conversations that you realize is complete fiction but appears as it is faultless fact. I like "Globe" like articles, so I was not going to take it too seriously, but after seeing things I know cannot possibly be right, I realized I could believe none of it. And neither should you, even for fun.

Giuliano's research into John Lennon's post-Beatle years is at once compelling and nasty -- not unlike a car accident you both wish you hadn't seen, yet still wonder if you could have had a better view. Lurid, often sloppy (dates are mixed up; Lennon supposedly dreams of Madonna in the late seventies, years before her first album even appeared), yet no Grossmanesque butcher job. Giuliano obviously cares deeply for his subject, but doesn't seem to really know how to balance Lennon's innate contradictions. Photos of Lennon during '75-80 rarely show a less than healthy ex-Beatle; yet Giuliano would have us believe he was a sickly malnourished neurotic heroin addict who kicked babies wives and mistresses in his spare time. Still, an intriguing book. Can't put it down, can't help but wonder about Lennon's last years -- yet at the same time terribly doubtful about this book's supposedly "accurate" resources.

I've loved John Lennon since I was 15 (I was born in '73) and at first, loved him as the quintessential 'roughneck' Beatle-boy. After listening to all of the Beatles, and most of Lennon's solo work, I felt there was much more to Lennon than one could imagine. A darker, more self-deceptive and sinister side.
If the peace-lovin', or even straightlaced (like my parents) generation of the '60's, would have their way, John would (and is) branded as the radical, hippie peacenik, or just general happiness-spreading guy, that revolutionized the world through his music, his (and the Beatles') charm and the 'media's' interpretation of his work. As a child of the 80's and 90's (god rest Kurt Cobain), I choose to seek out the more bare-boned truth about Lennon. If you believe that the 'Media' tells us everything about an artist, even in his own supposed words, then you should not read this. If you believe that Lennon, in his best efforts in songwriting, showed us 'everything' there is to know about him, you should not read this. If you believe that history is made the most truthful today, instead of when most of the figures are long dead, you should not read this. In the last few years, from seeking out books from Fred Seaman, May Pang, Albert Goldman (gasp!), I have found that Lennon is the most endearing, and the most tragic, of all Myth-like figures.
Lennon's caustic anger is well-known, even innocent figures like Dezo Hoffmann, in his book 'The Faces of John Lennon', tell of John's savage anger, putting Dezo down in front of a whole film crew (and this was a book of portraits, with a small intro, nonetheless!). Brian Epstein, probably the most sympathetic and admirable of the Beatles' entourage, suffered (in his own, or as others' say, Derek Taylor's) book, when he talks about John's savage outbursts.
Can it not be said that John was a completely insecure, paranoid man who suffered many demons?
This is what Giuliano is trying to convey, and I think he does it quite well.
That John was bisexual, I have no doubt. Stuart Sutcliffe was an up and coming great artist, and according to many modern opinions in the art world, might have become one of the defining artists of his generation, if not for his death. When John met Yoko, I believe he said something to the effect of his 'wanting to meet a true artist and be swept away', as he was with her.
Why wouldn't John have been captivated by Stuart? He met Cynthia at art school, but she didn't live up to his demanding expectations...
Giuliano's writings may not merit 'scholarly research', but it seems to me that his writing of John in his later years, paranoid, lost, self-doubting, starving himself or drugging himself into ill-health (can anyone say that the last pictures of John are HEALTHY ones! To me, in every pic, good and bad, of the last few years of his life, he seems to be a very emaciated, walking skeleton, so very sad to see, considering how beautiful John was up to about 35), are very true ones.
Even Julian, on his own website, has this quote:
"My dad's music was a great inspiration to me
He wasn't a great father. He was a great musician. That's always been a touchy one, and it will be until I can find the answer, but I don't know if there is one. I didn't hate him, but I was scared of him. I didn't know this man at all, and trying to rebuild a relationship that was never there made him as frightened of me as I was of him."

Giuliano actually treats Yoko fairly, I think (but then again, I've read Goldman, and his absolute vilification of her character chills me). Giuliano does give Yoko some credit, unlike many reviewers who have said he grates her to shreds, by noting that Yoko did her best to save Lennon from a sure breakdown, a few times over. At the same time, it seems that Yoko stifled John by becoming an almost 'Aunt Mimi' figure, demanding, impossible to please, ever critical.
As far as all the mumbo-jumbo about numerology, astrology, psychic matters in the book, isn't it clear that John wrote some rather shamanistic tunes? #9 dream, Mind Games, I Am the Walrus, Tomorrow Never Knows? Didn't he write some rather low self-esteem tunes, like 'I'm A Loser', 'Help!', 'Mother', 'Jealous Guy', and dare I say, 'Crippled Inside' (which was supposedly written about Paul, but I really think is John talking about himself).
Overall, I think he's done a fair job of showing us the last years of Lennon. I actually felt very depressed, though, in seeing a great man, who, if he would have believed more in himself, could have saved himself and gone on to make more meaningful, gorgeous music, as he did with the boys in the glory days.

I've read this book twice. Once when it came out and once again recently. Both times I thought little of it. It is better suited in a tabloid than a bookstore.

Truly, it is the rumors and gossip that are treated as fact in this book that ruins it. The bisexual stuff, I mean, he can't possibly know if any of that is true and yet he seems to have no problem with dispensing it.

He looks at Lennon very negatively- the cup is always half empty and I'll give you a perfect example. The story about the creation of "I Want to Hold your Hand." John and Paul were writing this and they were trying to find the chord that would give structure to the song. They were running through ideas and Paul hits a chord. John said he stopped and shouted "That's it! Do that again!" Thus the song was on it's way to being what it is. Now, in other books, John is praised for recognizing this chord and is given credit for doing so. Goldman, however, in his referencing the song, all he says about it is Paul was responsible for finding the chord that made "I want to Hold Your Hand." That's it. He doesn't really tell the story, he leaves it at that, leaving the reader to assume Paul did it all by himself.

And that's what this whole book is. A bunch of half-stories. It's garbage.

Okay, here's the thing with this book.

A)How do you know that what Goldman says isn't true? You're not the one who did six years of research. B)As much as I admire John Lennon, it was refreshing to read a book that was the opposite extreme of all the sappy, fan-clubby stuff that's written about him, and C)with brutal honesty, it sheds light on the fact that Lennon vacillated between a need for commercial success and a need for artistic integrity in his work, something that all artists go through but no one wants to admit to it, especially about the great artists like John Lennon because it's much easier to slap the label "genius" on them and move on.

Yeah, the book is mean, but for the most part, I find the meanness necessary in light of all the other sappy tripe that's been written about him- and maybe it'll pave the way for more middle of the road approaches. The only thing I don't like is, he totally takes these cheap shots at Yoko Ono... yeah, Goldman, like THAT'S really original. I happen to like Yoko Ono.

I read this book when it was first released in the 80's and could not put it down, enjoying it even more than his previous book, ELVIS. Since Elvis had no pretensions about his public image vs. private (he's been called "the Howard Hughes of show business"), he received a harsh treatment from Goldman and it did feel like, as one reviewer said, Goldman "was picking on the rube." But looking at John Lennon, Goldman ventures behind the Lennon-Ono "myth machine" to expose a mad couple's packaging of themselves and the weird reality they really lived. I liked Lennon and loved his wicked sense of humor, but I also have to admit that madness also fueled his genius and Goldman's book filled me with more pity than anything else.
The only thing missing from the new edition is the article Goldman wrote about the persecution he endured for writing about Lennon in the first place (only Penthouse would publish it at the time!). By taking on the cult of rock stars, he ended up enduring the wrath of America's mass media and the rock establishment itself (Rolling Stone dedicated an entire issue to defaming him and U2, those peace-loving ambassadors of goodwill, wrote a song that included lyrics calling for his death!).