Bøker av Jim Bishop

By the time he was 15, the author had lived at 10 different addresses and started over at seven different schools. At age fifteen he had lived enough torment and brutality, from his father who killed his mother in one of his violent rages when Jim was nine years old. Moving on, leaving behind, his father and his oldest, unfortunate, now adult brother. Jim still had much learning to do, through what was to be a very differently challenging, but in the end, rewarding and wonderfully satisfying culmination. Walk this amazing journey with Jim and discover how your road, yet to be travelled, need not be mapped, by that, travelled, so far.

The Golden Ham, first published in 1956, recounts the career of entertainer and comedian Jackie Gleason (1916-1987) from his beginnings in show-business to the mid-1950s when he was at the peak of his early success with The Honeymooners. In his foreword, author Jim Bishop says of Jackie Gleason that when the comedian read the manuscript for the first time "he did not ask that anything be either omitted or altered. And yet there were parts of this biography that made him wince." For The Golden Ham is candid biography. To it Mr. Bishop brought his painstaking interest in detail, his reporter's curiosity, his layman's interest in the world of the theater, and his detachment. And most important, he began and ended his job with Jackie Gleason's guarantee that nothing Bishop wrote would be censored. The result is a kind of theatrical biography that is entirely new and, like Gleason himself, is made up of a great deal of a great many things. As Bishop says: "There are several Jackie Gleasons. I know some of them. There is Gleason the comedian. Millions know him, and he's a great talent. Then there is Gleason the producer and Gleason the writer. Some people know these...Gleason the businessman-second-rate, but he thinks he's good at it - and then there is Gleason the thinker (apt and fast) and Gleason the man (fat, out of shape, but light on his feet) and Gleason the tenement-house kid from Brooklyn (nervy and not a bit surprised that he's on top) and Gleason the lover, Gleason the musician, Gleason the moody, and Gleason the lonely, tormented soul." This is a book about Jackie Gleason. If you like him, it may make you like him more, or less, depending on the kind of person you are. If you never liked him, it may change your mind a little. If you never had any special attitude toward Jackie Gleason, you will have one by the time you have finished this book. Gleason, a 4-pack-a-day smoker, passed away at his home in Florida on June 24, 1987.

Jim Bishop's trademark suspenseful, hour-by-hour storytelling style drives this account of an unforgettable day in American history. Culled from interviews with more than three hundred individuals, his retelling tracks all the major and minor characters of that day—JFK, Oswald, Ruby, LBJ, Jackie, and others—illuminating a human drama that many readers believe they know well. At once moving and terrifying, and filled with vivid detail, it delivers the haunting feeling of being there as the day's events unfolded in both Dallas and Washington.As gripping as fiction but with a journalist's exacting detail, The Day Kennedy Was Shot captures the action, mystery, and drama that unfolded on November 22, 1963.

Bishop's unforgettable chronicle of the movements of Lincoln and his assassin during every moment of the fateful day of April 14, 1865.

"This is a book about the most dramatic day in the history of the world, the day on which Jesus of Nazareth died. It opens at 6 P.M.—the beginning of the Hebrew day—with Jesus and ten of the apostles coming through the pass between the Mount of Olives and the Mount of Offense en route to Jerusalem and the Last Supper. It closes at 4 P.M. the following afternoon, when Jesus was taken down from the cross. . . . The fundamental research was done a long time ago by four fine journalists: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. The rest has been added in bits and pieces from many men whose names span the centuries."—from the Foreword

A reissue of the classic retelling of the Nativity. "Written with dignity, unerring taste, and with no straining for effects."--Chicago Sunday Tribune