About this item
In his commanding new book, the eminent NPR critic Tim Riley takes us on the remarkable journey that brought a Liverpool art student from a disastrous childhood to the highest realms of fame. Riley portrays Lennons rise from Hamburgs red light district to Britains Royal Variety Show from the charmed naivet of Love Me Do to the soaring ambivalence of Dont Let Me Down from his shotgun marriage to Cynthia Powell in 1962 to his epic media romance with Yoko Ono. Written with the critical insight and stylistic mastery readers have come to expect from Riley, this richly textured narrative draws on numerous new and exclusive interviews with Lennons friends, enemies, confidantes, and associates lost memoirs written by relatives and friends as well as previously undiscovered City of Liverpool records.
About the Author
NPR CRITIC, AUTHOR, PIANIST, and SPEAKER TIM RILEY reviews pop and classical music for NPR's HERE AND NOW, and has written for the HUFFINGTON POST, THE WASHINGTON POST, SLATE. COM and SALON. COM. He was trained as a classical pianist at Oberlin and Eastman, and remains among the few critics who writes about both "high" and "low" culture and their overlapping concerns. Brown University sponsored Riley as Critic-In Residence in 2008, and in 2009 he began teaching multi-media courses as Journalist In Residence at Emerson College in Boston. His first book, Tell Me Why: A Beatles Commentary (Knopf/Vintage 1988) , was hailed by the New York Times as bringing "new insight to the act we've known for all these years. .."A staple author in college courses on rock culture, he gave a keynote address at BEATLES 2000, the first international academic conference in Jyvé¤skylé¤, Finland. Since condemning the rap group Public Enemy for anti-semitic remarks in his 1990 Boston PHOENIX column, Riley has given lively multi-media lectures at colleges and cultural centers like the Chautauqua Festival on "Censorship in the Arts," and "Rock History. " His current projects include the music metaportal, the RILEY ROCK INDEX. com, and a major new biography of John Lennon for Hyperion, fall 2011.
