The Good Life

With Frank Sinatra at eternal rest and Mel Torme felled by a 1996 stroke, Bennett has assumed the mantle of America's greatest crooner. This memoir tracks the singer's life from his birth in 1926 in Astoria, Queens, as Antonio Dominick Benedetto, through adolescent dalliances with music and art, an overseas stint in the Army and a series of stateside breaks that established him as a jazzy, technically masterful interpreter of popular standards. There are delightful bits of trivia, such as that Bennett, during his late-1980s comeback, became the first animated real-life character on The Simpsons. There's philosophy of a mild sort as Bennett lets off some steam about America's failure to deliver on its birthright of equality; he also laments that race, religion and sexual orientation divide people of like minds. Most of all, there are names, swarms of them. Bennett's list of influences, collaborators, acquaintances, employees and friends reads like a phone book of 20th-century celebrity. For all its star power, the book is ultimately undermined by a shortage of musical insight. Bennett only hints at his well-known animosity toward the rock music that derailed his career in the late '60s and early '70s. And while he is forthright about his demons, particularly two failed marriages and a nasty cocaine habit that almost ended in an overdose, this confessional strain is overpowered by a seeming preoccupation with portraying himself and his loved ones as fair-minded and affable. Bennett's book would have been better if he had left a little bit less of his heart in San Francisco and put a little bit more into this effort. (Nov.)