newsmakers

newsmakers

Yoko Ono, son swap memories

WASHINGTON

Sean Lennon is finding connections with his 77-year-old mother, Yoko Ono — not about the Beatles or John Lennon — but about her life in an interview broadcast on NPR as part of a national oral history project. In the interview aired Friday, Ono recalls meeting her father for the first time when she was not yet 3 years old. Ono says her mother was from a very rich family, and it made her father feel insecure.

Still, Ono says her mother would send her father to work as a banker in a chauffeured car. But he would get out two blocks from his office to walk so he wouldn’t be seen with a driver. The 35-year-old Sean Lennon reveals to his mother that he used to do the same thing when she sent him to school in a limo. Ono says it must be a DNA memory that led to the same experience.

HBO’s ‘The Wire’ topic of class at university

BALTIMORE

The former HBO series “The Wire” is the topic of a new class at Johns Hopkins University, in the city where the drama was based.

The class was introduced this semester and uses the Baltimore show as a way to look at the problems big cities in America face. Guest speakers have included former Baltimore commissioner Ed Norris, an actor on the show, and show creator David Simon.

The class was taught by Peter Beilenson, an adjunct professor, and uses the 60 episodes of the show as a textbook. The series ran from 2002 to 2008.

First book about royal couple is published

LONDON

First came the royal engagement. Now — 10 days later — the first book. “William and Kate: A Royal Love Story,” by The Sun newspaper’s royal reporter James Clench was published in Britain on Friday, the first in a slew of new titles about the relationship between Prince William and Kate Middleton that publishers hope will set cash registers chirping in the months before their April 29 wedding at Westminster Abbey.

Published by Harper Collins and The Sun — both owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. — the book is scattered with photos by Arthur Edwards, the paper’s long-serving royal photographer.

It is one of several books on the royal romance in the works. They include one by celebrity journalist Andrew Morton, whose 1992 book “Diana: Her True Story” rocked the royal family and punctured the image of Princess Diana’s and Prince Charles’ fairy-tale romance with its details of bulimia, depression and infidelity.

“William and Kate: A Royal Love Story” — due to be published in the U.S. on Dec. 17 — is a more reverent affair. It charts the romance between “the boy who would one day be king” and “the middle-class girl who had harbored a crush on him since her school days.”