The Last Days of John Lennon, James Patterson

It’s not actually a book on Lennon’s last days, rather his entire life. From his upbringing to the forming of the Beatles, their career and break up, his life as a solo artist, his marriages to Cynthia Lennon and then Yoko Ono, his relationships with the other Beatles, making a life in NYC, and so on. Patterson spends most of Lennon’s actual last days trying to get the reader into the mind of Mark David Chapman, who would be the man who murdered his hero, Lennon. The weaving of the stories is okay, but nothing like some of the other books about Lennon which are much more thorough and interesting. This book reads like fiction crime-drama, and for research, they did interview some of Lennon’s friends and associates, including Paul McCartney, for what I take from the look in at the Notes was not very long at all. This book seems to pick the most salacious parts of other interviews, books, newspaper clippings, etc… and at numerous times these sections or little tidbits don’t fit at all within the telling of the story… more they were just placed in there at opportune times which fit the timeline of that particular chapter. My suggestion is to go directly to the back of the book, look through all the Notes cited section and pick out the most cited books Patterson and his fellow co-authors used… and then pick a few of those books instead to learn in more detail about the life of John Lennon.