Just in time for the Chairman's centennial, the endlessly absorbing sequel to James Kaplan's bestselling Frank: The Voice...

Finally the definitive biography that Frank Sinatra,"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) powerful actor, business mogul, tireless lover, and associate of the powerful and infamous.

In 2010's Frank: The Voice, James Kaplan, in 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 Frank claimed his Academy Award in 1954 and had reestablished himself as the top recording artist in music. Frank's life post-Oscar was incredibly dense: in between recording albums and singles, he often shot four or five movies a year, did TV show and nightclub appearances, started his own label, and juggled his considerable commercial ventures (movie production, the restaurant business, even prizefighter management) alongside his famous and sometimes notorious social activities and commitments.

Richly detailed and intimately drawn, Sinatra is a remarkable contribution to the legacy of an American icon.

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"Just as his subject matured into a far more compelling artist than the one who had elicited squeals from bobby-soxers, the follow-up to Kaplan's Frank: The Voice is far more substantial than that initial volume... a riveting story, strong enough to stand on its own.... An appropriately big book for an oversized artistic presence." -Kirkus Reviews, starred review

"The great singer-actor contains multitudes in this vast, engrossing biography of Frank Sinatra's mature years. Kaplan delves with gusto into Sinatra's seething contradictions: swagger and insecurity; sensitivity and callousness; deep loneliness amid a perpetual throng of cronies... Kaplan's sympathetic but unflinching narrative revels in the entertainer's scandalous private life while offering rapt, insightful appreciations of his sublime recording and stage performances. His Sinatra is often appalling, sometimes inspiring, and always a fascinating icon of an energetic, resonant, yet doomed style of masculinity."-Publishers Weekly, starred review

"[A] remarkably insightful, gracefully, often eloquently written history of popular music and celebrity culture in twentieth-century America-all viewed through the lens of an iconic singer and undervalued actor whose wildly contradictory personality and tempestuous personal life built the legend. Sinatra's second act, Kaplan emphasizes, is a study in the use and misuse of power-and it wasn't all misuse. Showing terrific chops as a music critic, Kaplan offers an in-depth appreciation of Sinatra's wonderful Capitol years. As astute in his psychological analysis as in his music criticism, Kaplan makes sense of the singer's insistence on taking way too many encores by noting Sinatra's need for constant movement. That restlessness finally shook itself out, but, along the way, it drove a skinny kid from Hoboken to live a life that, as Kaplan concludes, touched almost every aspect of American culture in the twentieth century. That's a big statement, but this big book makes us believe it." -Booklist, starred review