Linda McCartney: A Portrait
Fields, a noted rock manager and journalist, offers chatty reminiscences about his late friend Linda McCartney. The story begins with her childhood in a New York, upper-middle-class family headed by entertainment lawyer Lee Eastman. Then Fields breezes through his first meeting with Linda in 1966, her work as a rock photographer, and her various brushes with such icons as Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, and Tim Buckley. The extended courtship and marriage of Linda and Beatle Paul McCartney, Linda's effect on the Beatles, her brief stardom as a member of Wings, and her subsequent post-rock life with Paul until her untimely death in 1998 are also covered. Although Fields treats Linda as her own person--not just a wife of a Beatle--this book will mainly appeal to diehard Beatlemaniacs. However readable, engaging, and heartfelt, Fields's biography degenerates into a series of personalized vignettes that contributes little to the understanding of rock music in the 1960s or the Beatles themselves. A marginal purchase.-Dave Szatmary, Univ. of Washington, SeattleCopyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.