35 years after my first reading, as per usual, this time the book hit me completely differently. All that time ago, I was a heartbroken Beatles fan still mourning the loss of a life taken too soon. And I was all of 19.

Back then, I could accept the somewhat spacier of John and Yoko's beliefs. I came at their words as a true believer.

Now, as the father of two, much more jaded by life, but still a Beatles and Lennon fan, and still mourning his loss, as well as George's, all these years later, I come at the book still admiring the man, admiring his convictions, his desperate search for peace, both within and without. I love how each deferred to the other, finished each others' sentences and, sometimes, gently disagreed with each other.

Harder to accept is their views on parenthood, but that's always a personal choice.

But, more than anything, what I took away from this interview series this time was, perhaps for the first time, John was human. He said incredibly intelligent things, he said dumbfoundingly stupid things, he said funny things, he said heartbreaking things.

John was, first a foremost, before he was a Beatle, a musician, a father, a husband, a champion of peace, he was a human being, with all the foibles and mistakes built in. Not a God, not someone to worship, hell, maybe not even someone to look up to.

But definitely someone we could learn from.

And I still am saddened that I live in a world without him. ( )

What an interesting look at this mould-breaking couple. Lennon is shifty, needling, egoic. Ono, unpredictable, imaginative, but a shepherd for Lennon and their relationship. He seems to love the way she lets him be helpless. They talk about their domestic life, about creation; John evinces a surprising sweetbitter hostility to the other Beatles (possibly excepting Ringo); he talks at length about some of their songs and where they came from. We hear about their relationships with parents and children, and there are a few admissions--John's violence toward women; the crossworld hounding and intimidation of Yoko's ex-husband over custody of their kid--that you don't expect they shopped around to the mags in general. It surprises a little how much insecurity John wears so close to the surface, underneath his hippie-Liverpudlian combination of peacnicity, self-potentiality jargon and comewhatmayism; but it does the heart good to see John the happy househusband and Yoko the steely CEO. And then you think about what was shortly, so shortly to come, and moue downcast (even still) for his lost genius. He talks about the music he'll be making when he's 85; it's sad. ( )

While it was very sad reading this when it first came out, knowing that you'd never hear anything new from Lennon after reading this, in retrospect the best thing about this book is that the interviewer takes him song by song and has him tell whether he or McCartney wrote it. ( )

Some interesting stuff, esp. John's thoughts on songs he penned--lots of doctrine, though ( )