Sinatra - Hardcover

Havers, Richard

3.89

46 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 078949650X ISBN 13: 9780789496508

Publisher: Dk Pub, 2004

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Highlighted by more than eight hundred photographs spanning seventy years, a visual biography of one of America's most famous singer-actors offers a portrait of his personal life, his music, his film career, and more, accompanied by information on his recordings, arrangements, and lyrics and a listing of his movies.

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Review:

A big, beautiful book -- Western Daily Press

A lavish book -- Billboard

Packed with photos -- Record Collector

From the Author:

Having been offered the chance to write this book my primary aim was avoid going over the same old ground in the same old way as every other biography about Frank Sinatra. Many books on Frank, as well as those about other performers, seem to treat their subject as living in some kind of vacuum. I decided to start with the premise, "it's Frank's world and we're just lucky to be living in it" and to take it from there. It�s about Frank's life in performance, it's about the world in which he lived, the world he helped create and it's about others who lived in both Frank's world and 'Frank's world'. The task was made immeasurably easier with DK�s innovative use of graphics and pictures, layering as one reviewer has called it. It is a serious biography running to well over a quarter of a million words to go along with the illustrations It�s not a book that 'dishes the dirt', although it doesn't ignore the things that happened in Frank's life that he and others may wish had not. I have tried to put into context how some of these episodes affected Sinatra and in particular how they affected his work.

I managed to interview many people who worked with Frank Sinatra, knew him, people whose songs Frank sang and others who had their own unique perspective on a career that lasted for seven decades. Amongst them was Alan Livingston, the man who signed Sinatra to Capitol Records in 1953 and saved Frank�s career. I spoke with Bill Miller the man who played piano for Frank from 1950 until his very last concert in 1995. There are the recollections of the great arranger and bandleader Billy May who died as the book was being completed and songwriter Jimmy Webb who told me. �He was more than just a singer, he was a cultural expression of a whole nation's sense of style. He was our notion of class and elegance.� I also spoke with many ordinary people who saw Frank perform as far back as 1943 in New York�s Paramount theatre.

When I interviewed Bill Miller he said. �He just wanted to be Frank Sinatra, and he became Frank Sinatra� To me this is the very essence of the man. Frank fashioned his own persona, created his own world, which is what made him unique. Too many biographies of Frank ignore his contemporaries, those who breathed the same air (even if it wasn�t so rarefied). In so doing they downplay Sinatra�s achievements. We�ll never see his like again and I hope this book goes some way to explaining what made Frank Sinatra, Frank Sinatra.

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