Twenty-eight.

As of Monday, that's how many years it's been since John Lennon was murdered. Think about it - that's the whole stretch of time from "Love Me Do" to "Double Fantasy," with an additional decade on top of that.

But even as the former Beatle recedes deeper into history, the fascination with his life and work continues unabated. Just this week, a book hit the shelves suggesting that Lennon's death was prophesied in the Beatles' lyrics. You can put it next to the volumes that purport to contain conversations with him from beyond the grave and suggest that Beatlemania was a clever plot hatched by Queen Elizabeth II and the Trilateral Commission.

A far more essential addition to the Lennon library, however, is Philip Norman's "John Lennon: The Life," a hefty biography published at the end of October by HarperCollins. This is the first major biography of Lennon in 20 years and, for now at least, is the best. Even though it sheds little new light on Lennon's tenure in the Beatles and as a solo artist - is there really anything earth-shattering that can be uncovered at this point? - it offers the best glimpse yet of Lennon's childhood and teenage years, and is takes a clear-eyed, balanced look at his virtues and vices.

Norman has previously tackled biographies of Elton John, Buddy Holly and the Rolling Stones, but he's probably best-known for "Shout!", his acclaimed 1981 Beatles biography. Norman's sympathies were clearly with Lennon in that volume, and that's little changed this time around.

Lennon's widow, Yoko Ono, withdrew her support from "John Lennon: The Life," though, after reading the manuscript. She claimed that Norman was "mean to John," but that's a puzzling assertion. The Lennon we see here is neither the one-dimensional, drug-addled monster portrayed in the slash-and-burn "Lives of John Lennon" by Dormont native Albert Goldman, nor the good-humored peacenik spouting utopian sentiments that Ono has served up in recent years. What we get is somewhere in the middle. Norman's Lennon is extraordinarily creative and extraordinarily capricious, kind, cruel, funny, jealous, loving and possessive.

In other words, a flesh-and-blood human being.

The story of Lennon's childhood has been told repeatedly, but Norman cuts through much of the mythology and misinformation that's grown up around it. He wasn't exactly abandoned by his merchant seaman father, as Lennon himself claimed later in his life, nor was he exactly abandoned by his mother. Rather, his no-nonsense aunt, Mimi Smith, apparently threatened to contact a social service agency and have Lennon taken away from his mother after she became pregnant by a Welsh soldier toward the end of World War II. Smith was childless, according to Norman, because she never consummated her own marriage, and raised him starting around age 6.

Though his childhood was relatively secure and financially untroubled by post-war standards, Norman detects a lack of nurturing and tenderness in Lennon's early days, which set the stage for the insecurities that dogged him throughout his life. Buttressed by wealth and fame, Lennon spent much of his 40 years searching for an all-encompassing answer to the quandaries of his existence, moving from drugs to meditation to primal scream therapy to radical politics to domesticity. Had he lived, it's hard to imagine Lennon ever settling permanently into contentment.

Norman's recounting of the frenzied days of the Beatles has a little bit of a paint-by-the-numbers feel. You get the impression that he's a little impatient with it, particularly after telling portions of the story previously in "Shout!" And Lennon's eventful solo years take up only about 140 of the book's 851 pages.

Norman gets most of his facts right, though a few minor errors do turn up. For example, he states that "The Ed Sullivan Show" aired on NBC-TV, when it was a mainstay of the CBS schedule, and he consistently misspells the last name of Jon Wiener, a University of California-Irvine history professor who has extensively researched the efforts of the U.S. government to deport Lennon in the 1970s.

In one interview or another since he killed Lennon, Mark Chapman has stated that he couldn't see Lennon as a human being when he squeezed the trigger. He was just a guy on an album sleeve. If Chapman ever reads it, "John Lennon: The Life" should give him some idea of just who that human being was.

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