He was the original teeny-bopper heartthrob and the harbinger of a new age of celebrity. When it snowed, one writer observed, “girls fought over his footprints, which some took home and stored in refrigerators.”
The story of Frank Sinatra’s rise and self-invention and the story of his fall and remarkable comeback had the lineaments of the most essential American myths, and their telling, Pete Hamill once argued, required a novelist, “some combination of Balzac and Raymond Chandler,” who might “come closer to the elusive truth than an autobiographer as courtly as Sinatra will ever allow himself to do.”
Now, with “Frank: The Voice,” Sinatra has that chronicler in James Kaplan, a writer of fiction and nonfiction who has produced a book that has all the emotional detail and narrative momentum of a novel.
Read it all.
Michiko Kakutani reviews James Kaplan's new book on Frank Sinatra
He was the original teeny-bopper heartthrob and the harbinger of a new age of celebrity. When it snowed, one writer observed, “girls fought over his footprints, which some took home and stored in refrigerators.”
The story of Frank Sinatra’s rise and self-invention and the story of his fall and remarkable comeback had the lineaments of the most essential American myths, and their telling, Pete Hamill once argued, required a novelist, “some combination of Balzac and Raymond Chandler,” who might “come closer to the elusive truth than an autobiographer as courtly as Sinatra will ever allow himself to do.”
Now, with “Frank: The Voice,” Sinatra has that chronicler in James Kaplan, a writer of fiction and nonfiction who has produced a book that has all the emotional detail and narrative momentum of a novel.
Read it all.