Frank: The Voice

Bestselling author James Kaplan redefines Frank Sinatra in a triumphant new biography that includes many rarely seen photographs. Frank Sinatra was the best-known entertainer of the twenti-eth century--infinitely charismatic, lionized and notori-ous 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 tur-bulent 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. "From the Hardcover edition."

Review :
"Wonderfully vivid.... 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, who has produced a book that has all the emotional detail and narrative momentum of a novel. Kaplan writes with genuined sympathy for the singer and a deep appreciation of his musicianship, and devotes the better part of his book to an explication of Sinatra's art: the real reason readers care about him in the first place. "--Michiko Kakutani, "The New York Times" " Monumental... FRANK: THE VOICE is a timely reminder of what all the fuss over Sinatra was about in the first place. Kaplan follows in the footsteps of Peter Guralnick, whose magisterial two-volume biography of Elvis Presley was a landmark excavation of the artist from the dead-celebrity junk pile. Striking a similar, though more stylized, note, Mr. Kaplan offers a retelling of the early life of Francis Albert that illuminates the incredible-but-true origins of a 20th-century phenomenon. ""--Wall Street Journal" "Fascinating...compelling...marvelously thoughtful [and] readable. Kaplan brings something valuable and new to this account of Sinatra's first four decades, culminating in his cinematic triumph in "From Here to Eternity" and stunning vocal comeback in the early 1950s. First and most valuable, Kaplan gives us an illuminating portrait of a serious artist who helped revolutionize his medium. Kaplan also does a brilliant job of suggesting how the way Sinatra sang the song grew out of the life of an artist every bit as confounding and conflicted as his era -- a man by turns generous, atte