Sinatra biography books
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5 Hot Books: A Big, Juicy Sinatra Biography and the Real-Life Tragedy Behind Moby Dick
Five books people are talking about this week -- or should be.
1. Sinatra: The Chairman by James Kaplan (Doubleday)
This is Frank Sinatra’s centennial year, an appropriate time for Kaplan to deliver the second and final volume of his engaging, and likely definitive, biography of Ole Blue Eyes. Picking up where volume one, Frank: The Voice, left off five years ago, Kaplan traces Sinatra’s life from his supporting role in From Here to Eternity through his years as friend of John F. Kennedy, husband of Mia Farrow, and occasional mafia fellow traveler – a riveting only-in-America life that cut a glittering and sometimes cruel swath through the second half of the 20th century.
2. In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex by Nathaniel Philbrick (Penguin)
Philbrick’s spellbinding 2000 bestseller told the story of the 1820 sinking of the Essex by a sperm whale, a tra
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Frank Sinatra bibliography
List of books about Frank Sinatra
This is a list of books about Frank Sinatra.
Biographies
[edit]- De Stefano, Gildo, The Voice – Vita e italianità di Frank Sinatra, Coniglio Press, Roma 2011 ISBN 978-88-6063-259-3
- Freedland, Michael (2000) All the Way: A Biography of Frank Sinatra. St Martins Press. ISBN 0-7528-1662-4
- Grudens, Richard (2010) Sinatra Singing. Celebrity Profiles Publishing. ISBN 978-0-9763877-8-7
- Havers, Richard (2004) Sinatra. Dorling Kindersley. ISBN 1-4053-1461-3
- Irwin, Lew (1997). Sinatra: A Life Remembered. Courage Books. ISBN .
- Kaplan, James (2010) Frank: The Voice. Doubleday. ISBN 978-0-385-51804-8
- Kaplan, James (2015) Sinatra: The Chairman. Doubleday. ISBN 978-0-385-53539-7
- Kelley, Kitty (1986) His Way: The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra. Bantam Press. ISBN 0-553-26515-6
- Lahr, John (1987) Sinatra. Random House. ISBN 0-7538-0842-0
- Munn, Micha
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Frank Sinatra’s character flaw isn’t hard to name. He lived in daily fear of humiliation.Photograph by William Gottlieb / Redferns / Getty
Having komma out of the closet, or the casino, not long ago, as an unqualified Frank Sinatra idolater, I approached the second volume of James Kaplan’s biography of the singer (“Sinatra: The Chairman”) with what our critical mothers and fathers would have called immense trepidation, since the book would have to deal not just with the great man’s best records but with his messy entanglement with the mob and his sad, stultified later years. (I saw him perform once, toward the very end, at Madison Square Garden, and it was like seeing the dead El Cid mounted on his horse to lead the Spanish Army: noble but undeniably stiff.)
Kaplan’s book turns out to be, to continue in the old reviewers’ language, hugely readable, vastly entertaining, a page-turner, and all the rest. But it’s also interesting as a fine instance of a strikingly newish kind of t