"Happiness is a warm gun..." — Lennon–McCartney

"Sometime in late 1968, Charles Manson was listening to 'The Beatles,' to use the proper name of what’s most often called the White Album, and decided that 'Helter Skelter,' an upbeat rocker about a roller coaster at an English amusement park, was a call to black insurrection in America, to be set off by the brutal murders of an actress, a hairdresser, a coffee heiress, and several other innocents.
     The question that this horrible incident has always provoked was not just: How could anyone have thought anything so murderously insane? It was also: Why was Charles Manson listening with such hallucinative intensity to an album whose other highlights were John Lennon’s delicate bossa-nova ballad to his mother Julia, Paul McCartney’s lyrical invocation of Noël Coward, and George Harrison’s mystical celebration of the varieties in a box of English chocolates[…]
     These questions come to mind in reading David Shields and Shane Salerno’s heavily hyped biography Salinger (Simon & Schuster), not least because, in one of the most bizarre sections of a bizarre book, they themselves raise the issue of murder-by-bad-reading, in connection with the murder (fearful symmetry!) of the Beatles’ John Lennon by Mark Chapman, who happened to have hallucinated a motive within The Catcher in the Rye. Shields and Salerno’s own peculiar view of Salinger forces them to insist that Chapman was not just a crazy hallucinant, but in his own misguided way an insightful reader, responding to the 'huge amount of psychic violence in the book.'”
– Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker
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"It took me years to write, will you take a look?" — Lennon–McCartney ("Paperback Writer")

"Philip Norman, a prolific biographer whose Shout! The Beatles in Their Generation is considered by many to be among the most absorbing and comprehensive biographies of the group, and whose John Lennon: The Life was widely admired, has been signed by Little, Brown and Company to write a biography of Paul McCartney.

     The book, which is due in 2015, is being written with what Mr. Norman described in an e-mail as Mr. McCartney’s 'tacit approval.'
     'He is not directly co-operating,' Mr. Norman wrote, 'but not objecting to my interviewing close friends, colleagues, etc.'
     In a way, Mr. McCartney’s consent to the project suggests the extent to which his relationship with Mr. Norman has warmed in recent years. When Shout! was published Mr. McCartney disdained it, partly because it advanced some unusual theories, including one in which the death of the band’s manager, Brian Epstein, which was ruled as accidental, was actually the result of a murder plot."
— Allan Kozinn, The New York Times (Arts Beat)
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Boom Books

From: davidbowie.com. More about Kirlian photography here...

"Call them the Big Five. Game hunters have their wish-list of trophy animals, and rock music has its own – the elite group of rock stars yet to be bagged for publishing deals. This month, after HarperCollins snapped up the autobiography of Pete Townshend of the Who after a bidding war, publishers' sights are firmly set on the few remaining major talents to have held back from a book deal. Paul McCartney, Elton John, Robert Plant and Bruce Springsteen are on that list, but at the top for many in the book industry is David Bowie. [...]
     Music writer Luke Bainbridge says the appetite for these [Big Five] books is enormous. 'It is because you have got a set of rock stars and of fans who have reached the right age. These are the bands doing the classic album tours, whether it is Primal Scream or Suede.'" — Vanessa Thorpe, The Observer
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"One of the hottest properties making the rounds at that annual festival of literary wheeling and dealing, the Frankfurt Book Fair [2010], isn't some tome by the hot young author du jour. It's a hard-to-classify work of nonfiction by a veteran rock star. Call it a book oddity.
     To hear it from reports coming out of Frankfurt over the last four days, David Bowie's mysterious secret project, Bowie: Object, has been generating a hive of buzz.[...] 'We still don't want to give too much away just yet, suffice to say that David Bowie has been working on a book called Bowie: Object, ' a post on the [Publishers Weekly] site reads." — all about jazz
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"Bowie: Object features 100 fascinating items that give an insight into the life of one of the most unique music and fashion icons in history. The book's pictorial content is annotated with insightful, witty and personal text written by Bowie himself." — davidbowie.com
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(Note: David Bowie's book Bowie: Object has yet to appear on bookstore shelves. But when it does, go here to get it.)