Sheff’s most important accomplishment may be taking this reframing a step further. By explaining Ono’s personal history and artistic path, he builds the case that she, not Lennon, was more damaged career-wise by their union ... The first significant biography ... The strength of Sheff’s book is simple journalism, connecting the dots that existed only vaguely before Yoko.
There have been other biographies of Ono... [but] Sheff’s is the closest to an authorized one the world will get ... The book is predictably sympathetic, but not fawning, mostly written in a straightforward prose ... I am not an Ono-phile who wants to wallow overmuch in this kind of art, but applaud Sheff’s book as an important corrective to years of bad P.R.
Sheff is at pains to recap the misogyny and racism that obscured her story ... Ono remains hard to love. But reading this book, I wondered, yet again, at how little thought we gave to people’s psychology in the past.
Compelling ... Throughout her life, Yoko Ono has been a target of misogyny and racism. Until recently, Sheff maintains, her identity as Mrs. John Lennon and her roles as celebrity widow and radical political activist contributed to an underestimation of her talent as an artist.
It’s clear Sheff wants to be fair-minded, but we can sense the weight of Yoko’s gravitas bearing down upon him. He seems to continually find ways to excuse, explain, or rationalize away many of her inexcusable behaviors. Still, we find ourselves forgiving him because we sense like so many of us, Scheff is enthralled with Yoko ... Sheff’s narrative holds our attention but perhaps not for the right reasons. He becomes the voice of one of her surrogates instead of a penetrative biographer
Don’t open these pages expecting a hatchet job. Nor is Yoko a hagiography, though. Ono is too complex a person for that. Sheff doesn’t shy away from her capacity for protective selfishness, incredible self-indulgence, mind-boggling superstitiousness – consulting tarot readers, numerologists and psychics – and the seemingly magical thinking with which she ran a business empire that nonetheless became wildly successful.
Much of the book’s latter sections, following Lennon’s murder in 1980, betray a friend’s effort at hagiography, praising her music and later accomplishments with little detail or context ... A compromised biography that still sheds light on a divisive figure.
