He was the original teeny-bopper heartthrob and the harbinger of a new age of celebrity. When it snowed, one writer observed, \u201cgirls fought over his footprints, which some took home and stored in refrigerators.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n
The story of Frank Sinatra\u2019s 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, \u201csome combination of Balzac and Raymond Chandler,\u201d\u009d who might \u201ccome closer to the elusive truth than an autobiographer as courtly as Sinatra will ever allow himself to do.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n
Now, with \u201cFrank: The Voice,\u201d\u009d 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.<\/p>\n