Should I believe some of the more sensationalistic portraits of John Lennon and Yoko Ono presented in books such as "The Secret Lives of John Lennon"?

In a word...no. Neither John Lennon nor Yoko Ono were perfect people, yet both were far from deranged sociopaths. All of Albert Goldman's main sources have a serious lack of credibility, mostly due to personal grdges against John, Yoko, or both.

Fred Seaman, author of _The Last Days of John Lennon_ and onetime Lennon personal assistant, was sued by Yoko Ono after a number of missing Lennon personal items were discovered in his posession. Although Mr. Seaman acknowledges his bias in his book, and attempts to use it as "justification," this does not make his recounting of facts any more reliable. Additionally, Seaman chooses to "forget" about documents in his own handwriting, indicating plans to "doctor" Lennon's stolen diaries, and also the large amount of recordings and pictures which have appeared on bootlegs, traceable directly to Fred"eric" Seaman.

The link to Goldman is that Seaman was given an advance for a Lennon book before Goldman's publication. That book was eventually ... more.

I cant really gove you an answer,but what I can give you is a way to a solution, that is you have to find the anglde that you relate to or peaks your interest. A good paper is one that people get drawn into because it reaches them ln some way.As for me WW11 to me, I think of the holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors, their families and those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.