Product Description

Drawing upon intimate conversations over the course of many years, Hamill evokes the essence of Sinatra - examining his art and his legend from the inside. Shaped by Prohibition, the Depression, and war, Sinatra became the troubadour of urban loneliness; he was one of the few artists of the 20th century to break through an ethnic parochialism that imprisoned so many turn-of-the-century immigrants and their children. With his songs, he enabled millions of others to tell their own stories, thus providing an entire generation with a sense of tradition and pride belonging distinctly to them. Products of the same urban landscape, both Hamill and Sinatra can be credited with giving the American city a voice. This is a touching portrait of a 20th-century icon.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #412896 in Books
• Published on: 2003-09-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

About the Author
Peter Hamill is a novelist, journalist, editor and screenwriter. He has written 15 previous books and writes a daily column for the New York Daily News. He lives in New York City.

Customer Reviews

THE MOST LUCID, INTELLIGENT LOOK AT THE LEGEND
I am the eleventh of twelve kids. I am 42, and come out of Brooklyn. I have walked the streets of Hoboken. It reminds me of Bay Ridge, but the Statue of Liberty is facing the other way, and the Twin Towers are so big and close. My father had a bar in Brooklyn: a place that catered to the lonely: longshoreman who didn't want to go home for whatever reasons, older women who were jilted by the latest bum. They drank, a concordat of losers. In silence, they smoked unfiltered cigarettes and listened to that guy on the jukebox. The guy who really felt their pain, decades before it became some rank political joke. The voice was Frank Sinatra's, and he was my hero since I could walk. Pete Hamill, whom I've been reading for over twenty-five years, has the lapidary's eye, the poet's words, in his brilliant analysis of Sinatra the man, and what his essence really meant. Speaking of Sinatra after his death, Hamill writes: "Now Sinatra is gone, taking with him all his anger, cruelty, generosity, and personal style. The music remains. In times to come, that music will continue to matter, whatever happens to our evolving popular culture. The world of my grand-children will not listen to Sinatra in the way four generations of Americans have listened to him. But high art always survives. Long after his death, Charlie Parker still plays his version of the urban blues, Billie Hoilday still whispers her anguish. Mozart still erupts in joy.....In their ultimate triumph over the banality of death, such artists continue to matter. So will Frank Sinatra." This slim volume is the best thing I've read about Sinatra. Hamill hides no blemishes, and still gives us a totality of the man that no other biographer could. Alas, most great singers and writers now repose on the other side of the grass. We no longer have Sinatra in the flesh, yet, through his music, he will outlive everyone. And in the year 2067, a young adult will listen to the unparalleled majesty of his voice for the first time, and then go to the library to read WHY SINATRA MATTERS by Pete Hamill to make some sense of it all. KEVIN FARRELL

"Why Sinatra Matters" doesn't matter
What Pete Hamill wrote in 180 pages could have condensed into about 10 pages. I got this book hoping to find out more about why Frank Sinatra matters. Rather than give the reader definite examples and then elaborate on them, Mr. Hamill gives a shallow biography that could be read in a number of other biographies. What, for example, does his mother's political connections have to do with why Sinatra matters? Neither do the accounts of his adolescent years nor his association with the mob have anything really to do about why he matters. The only thing that really matters about Frank Sinatra, which the author could have said in one chapter (one chapter being the entire book) is that he knew how to deliver a song, be it a ballad, up-tempo or Latin. He was the Master when it came to breath control and pronunciation and singing on key. And he wasn't a bad actor either. To put it in a nutshell, Sinatra matters because of his music.....nothing else. He will be remembered for for the hundreds (or is it thousands) of songs he sang and recorded and for being a showman. In 50 years, they will still be playing his songs as we have enjoyed hearing them for the past 60 years.

Great book - too short!
Hamill has a true talent for identifying and decsribing the American ethnic experience. He combines this with frank personal insights in a illuminating and entertaining book about a tremendous figure. The only problem was the second half of the book was lost on the way to the publishers and thus never made into print!