James Kaplan

1959 saw Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the other members of Miles's sextet come together to record the seminal jazz album of all time Kind of Blue. 3 Shades of Blue is a biography on the paths which led Miles, Coltrane and Evans to the mountaintop of 1959 and the aftermath....

The National Bestseller One of The Minneapolis Star Tribune's Best Books of the Year “A superb book...[Kaplan is] a master biographer, a dogged researcher and shaper of narrative, and this is his most ambitious book to date.” —Los Angeles Times From the author of the definitive...

They were the unlikeliest of pairs—a handsome crooner and a skinny monkey, an Italian from Steubenville, Ohio, and a Jew from Newark, N.J.. Before they teamed up, Dean Martin seemed destined for a mediocre career as a nightclub singer, and Jerry Lewis was dressing up as Carmen Miranda and...

Bestselling author James Kaplan redefines Frank Sinatra in a triumphant new biography that includes many rarely seen photographs. Frank Sinatra was the best-known entertainer of the twenti­eth century—infinitely charismatic, lionized and notori­ous in equal measure. But despite his mammoth...