Books like December 8, 1980: the day John Lennon died by Keith Elliot Greenberg

John Lennon: Uncovering the Life of the Legendary Rock Star

A top crime journalist reveals precisely how the world-shattering murder of John Lennon happened—and why In Let Me Take You Down, Jack Jones penetrates the borderline world of dangerous fantasy in which Mark David Chapman stalked and killed Lennon: Mark David Chapman rose early on the morning of December 8 to make final preparations. . . . Chapman had neatly arranged and left behind a curious assortment of personal items on top of the hotel dresser. In an orderly semicircle, he had laid out his passport, an eight-track tape of the music of Todd Rundgren, his little Bible, open to The Gospel According to John (Lennon). He left a letter from a former YMCA supervisor at Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, where five years earlier, he had worked with refugees from the Vietnam War. Beside the letter were two photographs of himself surrounded by laughing Vietnamese children. At the center of the arrangement of personal effects, he had placed the small Wizard of Oz poster of Dorothy and the Cowardly Lion. “I woke up knowing, somehow, that when I left that room, that was the last time I would see the room again,” Chapman recalled. “I truly felt it in my bones. I don’t know how. I had never seen John Lennon up to that point. I only knew that he was in the Dakota. But I somehow knew that it was it, this was the day. So I laid out on the dresser at the hotel room . . . just a tableau of everything that was important in my life. So it would say, ‘Look, this is me. Probably, this is the real me. This is my past and I’m going, gone to another place.’ “I practiced what it was going to look like when police officers came into the room. It was like I was going through a door and I knew I was going to go through a door, the poet’s door, William Blake’s door, Jim Morrison’s door. . . . I was leaving what I was, going into a future of uncertainty.”

"What are the words we use to describe something that we never thought we'd have to describe? In Seven American Deaths and Disasters, Kenneth Goldsmith transcribes historic radio and television reports of national tragedies as they unfurl, revealing an extraordinarily rich linguistic panorama of passionate description. Taking its title from the series of Andy Warhol paintings by the same name, Goldsmith recasts the mundane as the iconic, creating a series of prose poems that encapsulate seven pivotal moments in recent American history: the John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and John Lennon assassinations, the space shuttle Challenger disaster, the Columbine shootings, 9/11, and the death of Michael Jackson. While we've become accustomed to watching endless reruns of these tragic spectacles -- often to the point of cliché -- once rendered in text, they become unfamiliar, and revealing new dimensions emerge. Impartial reportage is revealed to be laced with subjectivity, bias, mystery, second-guessing, and, in many cases, white-knuckled fear. Part nostalgia, part myth, these words render pivotal moments in American history through the communal lens of media"--Dustjacket.

Recollections of John Lennon captured in a series of Rolling Stone interviews conducted in 1970 and published in 1971.

A candid biography of John Lennon drawn from more than sixteen years of research, exclusive interviews, private letters, and his own diaries, offering an unfiltered view of the gifted artist’s inner life.

Discover the true story behind the murder of one of the world's greatest musicians, John Lennon, as told by James Patterson, the author of the 'Gone Girl' series.