PositiveWall Street Journal...not organized quite like a traditional memoir. Mr. Oppedisano starts by recounting his life up to the point he came to work for Sinatra, but most of the book details hundreds of late-night conversations with Sinatra over a six-year period ... What we overhear in these conversations often disagrees with other accounts; in fact, there’s new information on almost every page ... The stories Sinatra told may have been inaccurate. There’s no reason to doubt, however, that Mr. Oppedisano has accurately reported what Sinatra told him ... Frank fans will find plenty to cheer in Sinatra and Me. There are no accounts of the singer being violent or excessively cruel here; the worst “the old man” does is get momentarily angry at someone. Most of all Tony Oppedisano has provided future biographers and scholars with plenty of new material—no easy task—while presenting a believable portrait of a towering 20th-century figure in the defiant December of his years.
Ricky Riccardi
RaveThe Wall Street JournalHeart Full of Rhythmis an all-encompassing, vividly detailed biographical portrait of one of the richest careers in all of music ... Mr. Riccardi, the director of research collections for the Louis Armstrong House Museum in Queens, N.Y., takes us through every recording session, and what seems to be an equally exhaustive list of surviving audio and video documents, including radio shows and movies ... What could have been a dry collection of record reviews instead becomes, in Mr. Riccardi’s hands, the most interesting part of the whole work.
