Product Description
Just in time for the Chairman's centennial, the endlessly absorbing sequel to James Kaplan's bestselling Frank: The Voice--which completes the definitive biography that Frank Sinatra, justly termed the "Entertainer of the Century," deserves and requires. Like Peter Guralnick on Elvis, Kaplan goes behind the legend to give us the man in full, in his many guises and aspects: peerless singer, (sometimes) accomplished actor, business mogul, tireless lover, and associate of the powerful and infamous.
In 2010's Frank: The Voice, James Kaplan, in rich, distinctive, compulsively readable prose, told the story of Frank Sinatra's meteoric rise to fame, subsequent failures, and reinvention as a star of live performance and screen. The story of "Ol' Blue Eyes" continues with Sinatra: The Chairman, picking up the day after he claimed his Academy Award in 1954 and had reestablished himself as the top recording artist. Sinatra's life post-Oscar was astonishing in scope and achievement and, occasionally, scandal, including immortal recordings almost too numerous to count, affairs ditto, many memorable films (and more than a few stinkers), Rat Pack hijinks that mesmerized the world with their air of masculine privilege, and an intimate involvement at the intersection of politics and organized crime that continues to shock and astound with its hubris. James Kaplan has orchestrated the wildly disparate aspects of Frank Sinatra's life and character into an American epic--a towering achievement in biography of a stature befitting its subject.
Review
Praise for Sinatra: The Chairman
"Fifty pages from the end of Sinatra: The Chairman, the second and concluding volume of James Kaplan's magisterial biography of Frank Sinatra, I guarantee you'll begin to weep. Not because you've finished a 900-plus-page book (though you will feel relief), or because Kaplan so persistently details the ugly truth about Sinatra... No, you will weep over the death of a massive and unforgettable talent whose style of living helped define post-war America, and you will weep for an America that no longer exists, whether you lived during those years or just yearn for their return."
--Sibbie O'Sullivan, The Washington Post
"Kaplan's second volume is a hand-stitched tapestry with many, many recurring motifs... The remarkable thing is that Sinatra's career is such a compelling transit of the 20th century in American entertainment and politics--and an early and prophetic blending of the two--that the endless Kaplan book is endlessly engaging. His Sinatra is a magnificent monster--imperious and callow, thuggish and tender, an exquisitely lonely man forever surrounded by a posse of hangers-on."
--Edward Kosner, Wall Street Journal
"Do not be deterred by the book's heft. Sinatra: The Chairman is a riveting read--a juicy, painstakingly researched, excitingly written examination of a brilliant musician, an uneven and temperamental actor, and a charming, erratic, deeply flawed man."
--Julia M. Klein, The Boston Globe
"Definitive, and irresistibly engrossing...Kaplan is terrific dissecting Sinatra and the mob. His elucidation of Sinatra's contribution to the shadowy Kennedy presidential campaign is exemplary. He is at his best reporting 'the less than sublime goings-on, ' as he terms them, that "always in Frank's life...bracketed sublime music."
--Barry Singer, USA Today
"The degree to which that brutality is from reality and not just comic mythology in Vegas lounges can be read about in full glorious technicolor detail in one of the huge, and hugely compelling, books of 2015, Sinatra: The Chairman, the second volume of James Kaplan's wildly readable doorstop biography that began with the near-definitive Frank: The Voice."
--Jeff Simon, The Buffalo News
"Hugely readable, vastly entertaining, a page-turner."
--Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker
"I think James Kaplan's two volume set is the definitive word on Frank Sinatra, as definitive as any biography of any public figur
