Customer Reviews

Sinatra

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

To me, as someone who lived thru this era and read many books on Sinatra,
none has captured the essence of the man and the times he lived in as
Richard Havers has done. All aspects of Sinatra's life are discussed; the music,
the movies, the concerts and shows, his friends and his loves, good and bad,
in a fair, unbiased, nonjudgmental manner

This is a big book that contains a lot of information and pictures that you
will not find anywhere else. It can be read by casually leafing through the
pages and enjoying the sidebars and photos, or it can be read carefully from
beginning to end to reveal the real Sinatra. If you take the latter approach
you will not only better understand what made Sinatra tick, you will also
better understand the times he lived in.

Sinatra's life, in context of the 20th Century. A cornucopia of visual, literal and musical data to strum the strings of your heart. A wondrous trip down memory lane, side by side with our dynamite leader, Ole Blue Eyes himself. I am 70 years old and I feel I get to relive my life as I read this terrific book. Where did they get all the ticket stubs and programs; stuff I have never seen before? If you lived in the 20th Century and you loved it, you must have this book. You'll never finish reading it. There's that much to see. I am writing this review before I'm even halfway through and I've already cried and laughed and been astonished by the memories it evokes. And the dust jacket, in silver, black and white, with the sparkling blue eyes, makes you feel like a screaming bobby soxer all over again. Oh yes, I remember it well.

I have many books about Sinatra and this is one of the best. Richard Havers put together a wonderful read. The book combines his music and life very well in a chronological format. There are some great pictures and sidebars about other events music and otherwise associated with the time frame you are currently reading.The research put into this gem is amazing.If you are a fan of Sinatra get this book. You won t be able to put it down!

This book was a delight from beginning to end, packed with useful biographical information. It also contains dozens of sidebars on every one of Frank's albums as well as supplementary sidebars giving historical context to Sinatra's life and work in the form of other artists, historical events, and his various arrangers and labels. The book is packed with photos, memorabilia, track lists--in fact, everything you need to know about the life and work of Sinatra. I think that this book, combined with Will Friedwald's 'The Song is You' are the two best books on Sinatra, and as a dedicated Frankophile, I've read many. Also evident in the book is the author's love of Sinatra and his music. The book is like a virtual Sinatra museum, one you can open and enjoy over and over at your convenience.
Five stars.

This is an amazing book that lets you see Mr. Sinatra through the early days of his childhood, to what would become the ultimate legend...I was never into this kind of music but after listening to the wonderfully composed scores of music and lyrics, you cant help but become an avid fan of his. Through the good and the bad you see something everyone should strive for, the high expectation for ones self in whatever they do as he did and beautifully executed with class....I've discovered Frank Sinatra and I am definately Flying to the moon!!

Unlike the other reviewers of Richard Havers' "Frank Sinatra," I ended the book feeling very disappointed. This is a coffee-table book, not a serious biography. The writing style is dry and the rigid adherence to "just the facts" fails to generate a three-dimensional portrait of its subject. Havers gives us a huge number of "facts" about Sinatra's life and associates but resolutely refuses to provide us with any framework for making sense of the often contradictory material. And for too many of the key people in Sinatra's life, Havers provides us with only the sketchiest information. For example, we learn nothing about Jilly Rizzo, an important, close friend in the later decades of Sinatra's life and are unable to even guess why these two men would have become and stayed friends. As another example, Sinatra's last wife, Barbara Marx Sinatra, merits less than a half dozen mentions, and he was married to her for almost 25 years! We get absolutely no sense of who she was as a person or why Sinatra was attracted to (and stayed with) her, or what she was doing while Sinatra was relentlessly touring and performing. In addition, a "where are they now" page at the end, regarding his family and associates, would have given some sense of completion.

There are serious technical issues with this book as well. The editing is poor and in the final third, seems to be entirely absent, as the author is allowed to lapse into sloppy and repetitive writing. Internal chronology of the text is often confusing and we lose a grasp of when exactly events are happening. Textual formatting is very poor, with no line breaks within paragraphs even if the text suddenly moves to a completely different subject. There is no bibliography. There are no footnotes, so that we are completely in the dark as to the source of any of Havers' information. There is no timeline or chronology of Sinatra's life and career. There are references in the text to books by others about Sinatra and his films and music archive, but no full citations of those books are given anywhere.

The one strength of the book is its pictures and graphic material. Most of the pictures are interesting and reasonably related to the text. All the side-bar material is excellent - the Billboard charts, the album and film blurbs, and the brief biographies of Sinatra's musical peers and members of his team. But even here, there are serious technical problems: the photo credits are crammed into tiny type on the very last page of the book, while there are no credits attached to the photographs themselves (not even the identifying acronyms used in the back page); and the photo captions are never dated and often not placed in the text so as to be in proximity to the events or people they refer to.

Perhaps Havers wished to avoid the excesses displayed by such biographers as Kitty Kelley and felt that a purely factual presentation would be more "fair" to his subject. But unfortunately his approach gives us a flat picture of Mr. Sinatra; all events and "facts" are given equal weight so that it's difficult to judge the true importance of any of them; and the rare flashes of personality that he allow create odd jolts of color that end up unbalancing the portrait as a whole. I will have to look elsewhere for a better biography of Frank Sinatra.

Hey Everyone.

Its a good book. Its a COFFEE TABLE type book though.
Maybe I should have been more thorough in looking for a definitive Sinatra biography.

Its great, just letting everyone know its not feasible to take around with you to read at restaurants or other places for casual reading.

Great book, just be aware its not small enough for logical mobility.

Long live the Chairman of the Board!

Eddie

His voice, his style, a trip into the past. Ole Blue Eyes we will never forget him. For all old and new fans this book is a treasure indeed.