Book Review: 'Yoko: A Biography' and 'Ghosts of Iron Mountain: The Hoax of the Century, Its Enduring Impact, and What It Reveals About America Today'

'Yoko: A Biography' by David Sheff

"The past decade or so has brought a great reassessment of Yoko Ono," said Geoff Edgers in The Washington Post. No longer do Beatles fans blame her for the band's breakup, as they did for decades. Her art has been featured in a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, and her equally avant-garde music cited as an influence by Lady Gaga, St. Vincent, and David Byrne. David Sheff's new book, the first significant biography of Ono, pushes the re-evaluation further by arguing that Ono's career was more damaged by the couple's famous union than John Lennon's was. After all, her work would have been better appreciated by art critics than mainstream pop culture watchers. Still, "the strength of Sheff's book is simple journalism," in his marshaling facts to tell Ono's life story in full.

Sheff isn't just any biographer, said Kate Mossman in The New Statesman. He's been a friend of Ono's since, at 24, he interviewed Ono and Lennon for Playboy shortly before Lennon was assassinated in 1980. But he doesn't paint Ono as saintly. The book shows us a damaged woman, "not just withdrawn and cold, but positively screaming with an inner loneliness." Born in Japan to wealthy but distant parents, she wound up begging for food after surviving World War II bombing raids. When she moved to the U.S. and began gaining fame for performance art such as 1964's Cut Piece, in which viewers were invited to cut away her clothing, her parents were more ashamed than proud. Two years later, she met Lennon, and Beatles fans soon enough began demonizing her.

Sheff "covers the dark moments in the couple's relationship, including their heroin use," said Barbara Spindel in The Christian Science Monitor. "The author is also frank about Ono's shortcomings as a parent," reporting that both her daughter, Kyoko, and son, Sean, describe her as having been less interested in them than her art. Even so, Sheff's depiction of Ono "feels gentle, empathetic, committed to righting undeniable wrongs," starting with her influence on the Beatles, said Victoria Segal in The Times (U.K.). Without Ono, Sheff argues, Lennon may well have left the band before the recording of Abbey Road and Let It Be. The couple's 14-year relationship comes across here as "a profound love story, a febrile artistic partnership, a codependent nightmare, and a meeting of two traumatized minds." And while the decades after Lennon's murder appear to have been even more trying, Ono, now 92, didn't merely hide, and Sheff honors that. "Yoko: A Biography is by no means as radical as its formidable subject, but it successfully documents Ono's remarkable creative resolve and resilience."

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

'Ghosts of Iron Mountain: The Hoax of the Century, Its Enduring Impact, and What It Reveals About America Today' by Phil Tinline

"Yes, we have good cause to be wary of powerful people," said Jesse Walker in Reason. But if you want to understand how we arrived at this moment when many Americans believe the worst about their government, Phil Tinline's "thoughtful, engrossing, and highly readable" new book would make useful reading. In 1967, a book was published that purported to be the final report of a secret government group that had concluded that endless war is necessary to maintain social stability. War creates jobs and promotes patriotism, the thinking went, so peace must be avoided. But while Report From Iron Mountain was a hoax cooked up by left-wing satirists, it was widely embraced as truth even after its authors came clean, and it later helped spawn the right-wing conspiracy theories we still live with today.

The phony study evinced a callousness toward human life that was chilling, "if comically so," said Jeff Shesol in The New York Times. The idea had been the brainchild of Victor Navasky, the future editor of The Nation, who recruited writer Leonard C. Lewin to produce the document's credibly dry prose. Rising novelist E.L. Doctorow was then a top book editor, and he agreed to facilitate the hoax. As entertaining as Tinline's account is, he "never loses sight of where it is heading: toward a moment, our own, when conspiracists and crackpots have seized the levers of power." When the book went out of print in 1980, copies continued to circulate among both anarchists and right-wing militia members. Because they believed they were sharing the government's darkest secrets, a straight line can be drawn from the book's enduring popularity to today's assault on the "Deep State."

Tinline's account proves so "convincing and horrifying," said James Walton in The Telegraph (U.K.), that when he uses his closing chapter to suggest there's a simple solution, it "can't help but feel like wishful thinking." He cautions against ignoring the difference between facts that feel true and actual, proven facts. And, of course, all good citizens should remain mindful of that line. "Unfortunately, the hundreds of hair-raising pages that precede those closing words suggest, overwhelmingly, that the ship has long sailed."