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 thing: the serious and even scholarly biography of a much gossiped-over pop figure, where the old Kitty Kelley-style scandal-sheet bio is turned into a properly documented and footnoted study that nonetheless trades on, or at least doesn’t exclude, the sensational bits.
In Sinatra—some 25 percent longer than Frank—Kaplan loses the 'genius and great artist' ordering principle and offers a picaresque biography, with the slackness that adjective implies...[W]e move on to the next episode. Then the next. The result is useful as a reference work for all things Sinatra, not so much as a book even Sinatra enthusiasts would relish reading all the way through.
[A]s this more-than-900-page book increasingly turns from Sinatra’s music to his life in Hollywood, Vegas and Palm Springs, it bogs down in gossipy anecdotes and details that feel tedious and beside the point. It’s as if Mr. Kaplan had decided, with the second part of this volume, to go for inclusiveness rather than insight, encyclopedic compilation rather than interpretive analysis.
It all rolls in on relentlessly chronological fashion, weighted down with trivia — who sat in on which recording session, who shared the billings in Las Vegas, who produced and directed which movie, which wife put up with which of Sinatra’s affairs, and so on. Despite it all, Sinatra remains Chairman of the Board. But readers of this weighty book may be simply b-o-r-e-d.
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.
Sinatra’s need for distraction and his terror of solitude are a central theme of Sinatra: The Chairman, James Kaplan’s meticulously researched biography...
