Two Great Voices, Two Great Biographies: Sinatra and Dylan

Music fans, rejoice! We’ve got two great biographies to keep you busy this fall. Frank, by James Kaplan is the story of the best-known entertainer of the twentieth century. Kaplan brings deeper insight than ever before to the complex psyche and turbulent life behind Sinatra’s incomparable voice. In Bob Dylan in America, author Sean Wilentz follows the emerging artist as he develops a body of work unique in America’s cultural history.

Praise for Frank:

“A biography that reads like a novel. . . . Kaplan does a nimble, brightly evocative job of tracing the development of Sinatra’s art, and his remarkable rise and fall and rise again.” —Michiko Kakutani, “Top 10 Books of 2010,” The New York Times

“Fascinating, superbly written…. Whatever you think of Ol’ Blue Eyes, he led an incredible life, and his adventures make great reading. This book is biography at its best.” —The Dallas Morning News

“Marvelously thoughtful…. A propulsive narrative that never flags.” —Los Angeles Times

“[Readers] will be carried along by the undeniable pleasure of reading Kaplan’s page-after-page-turner, dense with details of long-forgotten trysts and tiffs, career and emotional highs and lows, movie- and record-business shenanigans…. A classic.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“Monumental…. Nobody has spun the old yarns with the raconteur’s touch and attitude that Mr. Kaplan brings to the job…. Illuminates the incredible-but-true origins of a 20th-century phenomenon.” —The Wall Street Journal

Praise for Bob Dylan in America:

“Wilentz’s book stands apart… in the lucidity of its prose, the rigor of its research and convincing originality of the place he assigns his subject in the context of American cultural history…. Here is scholarship that successfully slips the bonds of specialty and pretension.” —Los Angeles Times

“Author Sean Wilentz combines a lifelong music fan’s enthusiasm with a history detective’s doggedness to unearth Dylan’s entire root system…. The book is at once a time-hopping biography; a catalog of Dylan’s myriad, eclectic influences…and a primer on American music.” —The Christian Science Monitor

“Not just another biography of the chameleon folkie-rock-star-poet-troubadour…. At once deeply felt and historically layered.” —The Washington Post Book World

“Among those who write about Dylan, Wilentz possesses the rare virtues of modesty, nuance and lucidity, and for that he should be celebrated and treasured.” —The New York Times Book Review

“A panoramic vision of Bob Dylan, his music, his shifting place in American culture, from multiple angles. In fact, reading Sean Wilentz’s Bob Dylan in America is as thrilling and surprising as listening to a great Dylan song.” —Martin Scorsese