News!
Now out in paperback!
FRANK: THE VOICE is now an Anchor paperback!
Old girlfriends?
Now doing interviews for Volume 2 — would love to talk to old flames, lady friends, even casual dates of Mr. Sinatra's. All conversations are guaranteed to be judgment-free whether the relationship was affectionate, informal, or even paid....
Contact me, please, at james@jameskaplan.net.
James to LA and Palm Springs to do interviews for Volume 2
James will be interviewing for Volume 2 and visiting bookstores in LA and Palm Springs between 6/12/2011 and 6/17/2011.
James wins Washington Irving Book Award
James won the Westchester Library Association's Washington Irving Book Award at the WLA's annual event in Tarrytown, NY on May 13th, 2011.
James to write Volume Two
Publishers Weekly: "Doubleday has acquired SINATRA: CHAIRMAN OF THE BOARD by James Kaplan. Phyllis Grann, Senior Editor, acquired North American, Audio, and First Serial rights from Joy Harris, The Joy Harris Literary Agency, Inc., and the book is slated for publication in 2014. The volume will cover years from 1955 to Sinatra’s death in 1998 and will be a follow-up to Kaplan’s widely acclaimed national bestseller FRANK: THE VOICE."
Audio & Video
James Kaplan, Joan Jakobson Visiting Writer at Wesleyan University, speaks about Frank: The Voice, February 9, 2011
James Kaplan on NPR: How Sinatra Became “The Voice”
Click here to open the player or here to visit the web page.
Frank Sinatra - Only the Lonely
Written by Sammy Cahn/Jimmy Van Heusen. Recorded on May 29, 1958.
Rave reviews for Frank: The Voice in New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, &c.
“The story of Frank Sinatra’s rise and self-invention and the story of his fall and remarkable comeback…, 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, a writer of fiction and nonfiction who has produced a book that has all the emotional detail and narrative momentum of a novel.”–Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
"Monumental.... A bold narrative voice... hard to put down."— The Wall Street Journal
"Marvelously thoughtful, readable.... 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."— The Los Angeles Times
"Kaplan really gets what made Sinatra unique.... Above all, [he] grasps how unsuited—and at the same time, how perfect—Sinatra was for the job of American idol."—The Washington Post
"Kaplan's understanding and appreciation of the music simply set him apart…. At last, Sinatra has the biography he deserves—and so do we."—Declan Hughes, The Irish Times
"Riveting.... The book does music history a huge favor by reminding us that from his days with Tommy Dorsey to the twilight of his Columbia years, Sinatra was a singularly incandescent vocal phenomenon."—Stephen Holden, The New York Times
"Comprehensive, impeccably researched, factually acurate, detail-rich, insightful and humorous.... a pitch-perfect portrait of Sinatra as a young man."—The Buffalo News
"Stellar...."—Minneapolis Star Tribune
"An erudite, ring-a-ding-ding must-read."—Tim Appelo, The Hollywood Reporter
"Through talent, perseverance, momentum, ambition and sheer willpower, 'Frank: The Voice' — like the man it chronicles — ends up seeming some sort of a classic."—The San Francisco Chronicle
"Authentically a page-turner.... Day-to-day, night-to-night detail... yields an almost neurological realism."—Geoffrey O'Brien, The New York Review of Books
Publicity Tour Posted
The events for the book tour have been posted on the Media page.