Sinatra: The Life (Random House Large Print) - Hardcover

Summers, Anthony; Swan, Robbyn

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375435492 ISBN 13: 9780375435492

Publisher: Random House Large Print, 2005

Synopsis

Packed with revelations, this is the first complete account of a career built on raw talent, sheer willpower--and criminal connections. Anthony Summers--bestselling author of Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe--and Robbyn Swan unveil stunning new information about Sinatra’s links to the Mafia, his crowded love life and his tangled relationships with U.S. presidents. Exclusive breakthroughs include the discovery of how the Mafia connection began--in a remote Sicilian village--and moving interviews with his lovers. Never-before-published conversations with Ava Gardner get to the core of the tragic passion that dominated his life, came close to destroying him, and made his best work heartbreakingly personal. Sinatra delivers the full life story of a complex, flawed genius.
From the Trade Paperback edition.

About this title

From the Inside Flap

From the best-selling author of Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe, the first fully documented, comprehensively researched, birth-to-death biography—the definitive life—of Frank Sinatra.

Sinatra is the story of an American icon who held the imagination of millions for more than fifty years and whose influence in popular music was unsurpassed in the twentieth century. As a child, he said, he had heard "symphonies from the universe" in his head. No one could have imagined where those sounds would lead him. Tracing the arc of this incredible life, from the humble beginnings in Hoboken to the twilight years as a living legend in Malibu, Sinatra follows a career built on raw talent, sheer willpower—and criminal connections.

Drawing on a treasure trove of documents and interviews, Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan reveal stunning new information about Sinatra’s links to such Mafia figures as Sam Giancana and Lucky Luciano. And we see for the first time where the Mafia connection began, how and why it lasted, and how it impinged on others, not least President John F. Kennedy.

Here, too, is the core of the private Sinatra—alternately caustic and sympathetic—that the singer so long concealed. The heartbreaking truth about his passion for Ava Gardner emerges from never-before-published conversations with Gardner herself. In exclusive, intimate interviews, the women who loved Sinatra—some of them unknown to the public until now—share memories of the joy and pain of their relationships with him. And we learn what it was like to be the friend of a man who was generous and loyal to a fault, yet—as some of his fellow Rat Packers discovered—who could turn abruptly into a vindictive brute.

Dramatic, eye-opening, and unfailingly fair-minded, Sinatra is masterful biography: the revelatory story of a brilliant artist and an infinitely complex man.

About the Author

Anthony Summers, a former BBC journalist, is the author of six bestselling books, including The File of the Tsar, on the fate of the Romanovs; Not in Your Lifetime, on the assassination of President Kennedy; Official and Confidential, on J. Edgar Hoover; and The Arrogance of Power, on Richard Nixon. He won the Golden Dagger, the Crime Writers’ Association’s top nonfiction award, for Not in Your Lifetime. Robbyn Swan worked with Summers on the Hoover and Nixon biographies, and both authors have contributed to Vanity Fair and PBS’s Frontline. They are married, have five children between them, and live in Ireland.
From the Trade Paperback edition.

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House Large Print
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0375435492
• ISBN 13: 9780375435492
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 1040