Gay Talese once went to interview Frank Sinatra, but the singer was unable to speak due to a cold. So the journalist spoke with numerous of Sinatra's acquaintances and submitted a now-legendary essay to Esquire, the title of which serves as the title of this collection. Talese is an icon of American journalism of the 1960s and 1970s, setting the gold standard for reporting for decades to come. In his writing for Esquire, The New Yorker, and The New York Times, Talese elevated the art of feature writing to a fundamentally new level and captured an era of turbulent change with photographic precision. Talese's first collection in Russian includes landmark essays and reports written over a period of half a century, from the 1960s to the 2010s. World celebrities ranging from Sinatra to Lady Gaga, members of the Cosa Nostra mafia, and fellow journalists with their insatiable urge to write—whoever Talese writes about, he writes with poise and flourish, creating a detailed and vivid chronicle of human life.