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Frank Sinatra was the best-known entertainer of the twentieth century—infinitely charismatic, lionized and notorious in equal measure. But despite his mammoth fame, Sinatra the man has remained an enigma. As Bob Spitz did with the Beatles, Tina Brown for Diana, and Peter Guralnick for Elvis, James Kaplan goes behind the legend and hype to bring alive a force that changed popular culture in fundamental ways.
Sinatra endowed the songs he sang with the explosive conflict of his own personality. He also made the very act of listening to pop music a more personal experience than it had ever been. In Frank: The Voice, Kaplan reveals how he did it, bringing deeper insight than ever before to the complex psyche and turbulent life behind that incomparable vocal instrument. We relive the years 1915 to 1954 in glistening detail, experiencing as if for the first time Sinatra’s journey from the streets of Hoboken, his fall from the apex of celebrity, and his Oscar-winning return in From Here to Eternity. Here at last is the biographer who makes the reader feel what it was really like to be Frank Sinatra—as man, as musician, as tortured genius.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
November 2, 2010 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9780307748515
- File size: 651233 KB
- Duration: 22:36:44
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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James Kaplan, co-author with Jerry Lewis of DEAN AND ME, has written an intelligent, incisive, and often-poignant chronicle of Frank Sinatra. The biography covers his fascinating life, character, and spirit from birth through the mid-1950s. Narrator Rob Shapiro has a voice that is resonant, authoritative, and engrossing. Like a musical standard sung by a great singer, he delivers the book "from the inside out." Kaplan's extreme, sometimes-exhausting, detail is enlivened by Shapiro's well-suited narration. He gives a dynamic and sensitive performance through which younger listeners and long-term Sinatra enthusiasts alike will gain meaningful insight into a great artist who typified the best of the twentieth century. W.A.G. (c) AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine -
Starred review from September 13, 2010
In this riveting and fast-paced biography, Kaplan, coauthor with Jerry Lewis of Dean and Me, chronicles Sinatra's somewhat unlikely meteoric ascent to success, his failures, and his rebirth as a star of song and screen. With exhaustive, and sometimes exhausting, detail, Kaplan engagingly re-creates the young Sinatra's childhood in Hoboken, N.J., where young Frank was born, in 1915. By the time he was 12, Sinatra was singing for quarters on top of the piano in the bar in his father's tavern. At 21, Frankie joined a group that became known as the Hoboken Four, and everyone soon recognized Sinatra's great vocal gift. Kaplan expertly conducts us on a journey through Sinatra's early years with Tommy Dorsey and his long solo career; Sinatra's first marriage to Nancy Barbato and his more famous marriage to Ava Gardner; and through Sinatra's movie career and his rebirth in the early 1950s. Although Sinatra's career often faltered in the late 1940s, his partnership with Nelson Riddle and the release of the song "Young at Heart" in 1953 began Sinatra's comeback. Kaplan's enthralling tale of an American icon serves as an introduction of "old blue eyes" to a new generation of listeners while winning the hearts of Sinatra's diehard fans.
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