About this item
Just in time for the Chairman's centennial, the endlessly absorbing sequel to James Kaplan's bestselling Frank: The Voice - which completes the definitive biography that Frank Sinatra, justly termed the "Entertainer of the Century," deserves and requires. Like Peter Guralnick on Elvis, Kaplan goes behind the legend to give us the man in full, in his many guises and aspects: peerless singer, (sometimes) accomplished actor, business mogul, tireless lover, and associate of the powerful and infamous. In 2010's Frank: The Voice, James Kaplan, in rich, distinctive, compulsively readable prose, told the story of Frank Sinatra's meteoric rise to fame, subsequent failures, and reinvention as a star of live performance and screen. The story of "Ol' Blue Eyes" continues with Sinatra: The Chairman, picking up the day after he claimed his Academy Award in 1954 and had reestablished himself as the top recording artist. Sinatra's life post-Oscar was astonishing in scope and achievement and, occasionally, scandal, including immortal recordings almost too numerous to count, affairs ditto, many memorable films (and more than a few stinkers) , Rat Pack hijinks that mesmerized the world with their air of masculine privilege, and an intimate involvement at the intersection of politics and organized crime that continues to shock and astound with its hubris. James Kaplan has orchestrated the wildly disparate aspects of Frank Sinatra's life and character into an American epic - a towering achievement in biography of a stature befitting its subject.
About the Author
JAMES KAPLAN has been writing about people and ideas in business and popular culture, as well as noted fiction (Best American Short Stories) , for over three decades. His essays and reviews, as well as more than a hundred major profiles of figures ranging from Madonna to Helen Gurley Brown, Calvin Klein to John Updike, Miles Davis to Meryl Streep, and Arthur Miller to Larry David, have appeared in many magazines, including The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Esquire, and New York. His first novel, Pearl's Progress, was published by Knopf in 1989. His nonfiction portrait of John F. Kennedy International Airport, The Airport (1994) -- called "a splendid book" by Gay Talese -- remains a classic of aviation literature and New York storytelling. His second novel, Two Guys From Verona -- published in 1998 by Atlantic Monthly Press, and chosen by The New York Times as one of its Notable Books of the Year -- is being developed as a movie by Jeremy Garelick, screenwriter of The Break-Up and The Hangover. In 2002 Kaplan co-authored the autobiography of John McEnroe, You Cannot Be Serious, which was an international bestseller (and number one on the New York Times list) . His 2005 book Dean and Me: A Love Story, co-written with Jerry Lewis and published by Doubleday, was a New York Times bestseller as well. In November 2010, Doubleday published Frank: The Voice, the first volume of Kaplan's definitive biography of Frank Sinatra. The book was also a New York Times bestseller, and was chosen by Times chief book critic Michiko Kakutani as one of her Top Ten Books of 2010. James Kaplan lives in Westchester, New York, with his wife and three sons. You can visit his website at www.jameskaplan.net.
