Frank Sinatra turns 80 on December 12, setting off one of those familiar convulsions in the vast publicity machine of American show biz. The smoke has barely cleared from the last convulsion, concluded only a week or two ago for the Beatles, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of their breakup as ” the band that changed the world.” The juxtaposition makes for a revealing contrast. Frank never much liked the Beatles, never grew comfortable with the way they changed the world. Of course he didn’t: The world they changed, back there in the mid-sixties, was Frank’s world.

In addition to the TV specials, the CD retrospectives, the radio marathons, the somber appreciations in the newsmagazines and the lifestyle sections of newspapers, the publicity machine is offering up a crateful of books that range from the merely worshipful to the hagiographic. For example, Sinatra! The Song Is You (Scribner, $ 30, 557 pages) a long and loving account of the singer’s work by the critic Will Friedwald, features praise worthy of Bach or Shakespeare, complete with Straussian terminology: “His artistic canon is as close to perfect as any of us are able to deliver.”