The first and best biography of the great Troubadour with artwork by Martin Sharp. Throughout his lifetime, Tiny Tim was a repository of recorded music stemming from the early days of vaudeville to the latest chart favourites. But despite all these influences he remained a true original perfecting his performances as an outreach of his personality. True, he had some strange traits, but they did not impede on his enthusiastic kindness to people he loved, to the musicians he accompanied, and to the many listeners he met. In the age of celebrity, he functioned as the complete entertainer. Lowell Tarling has provided Tiny with a living biography and given us a definitive incentive to re-listen to his recording and re-visit his numerous You Tube postings. You get the feeling that somewhere Tiny is standing on his tiptoes, strumming his ukulele, blowing kisses and saying, 'God bless you all!' - Hal Stein, (Tiny's cousin and close friend) April 2013

From his first appearance on Rowan & Martin's Laugh In, pop culture entertainment curiosity Tiny Tim captivated audiences and became an instant star and enigma. Best known for his falsetto-voiced rendition of Tiptoe Through the Tulips and his tonight show wedding to Miss Vicki.

Lowell Tarling recorded Martin Sharp's life, and his effect on his friends, over twenty years. Now two volumes in one, in advance of the film of these books - GHOST TRAIN... Sharp: The Road to Abraxas - Part One, 1942-1979 Sharper: Bringing It All Back Home - Part Two, 1980-2013 'Like the Ancient Mariner, it's also a ghastly tale. I could understand the events at Luna Park a bit. I was trying to understand them and then suddenly there was this poetic language working to say: this is a crucifixion, Golgotha, death by fire. And then it starts to fit into Apocalyptic vision. It was Abraxas if you like - the dark face and the light face. To look upon Abraxas is blindness. To know it is sickness. To worship it is death. To fear it is wisdom. To assist it not is redemption. I don't know what it means. I've never been able to work it out. You get a Pop Art Parallel. It was the Year of the Child, the place of Golgotha, the Place of the Skull, and the Ghost Train. You then get these events that are caused by plotting, not caring for kids, carelessness, living a human life - the way of the world.' - Martin Sharp, 4 March 1984

Martin Sharp was an integral part of international Pop Art in the 1960s, magnified through his covers for OZ magazine in Sydney and London, his covers for Cream, and posters of Dylan, Hendrix and Donovan. His efforts at making The Yellow House and Luna Park cultural precincts, were aided by his screen prints and exhibitions to flaunt the work of others, especially the singer Tiny Tim. In this second of two volumes, Lowell Tarling offers us a way into the enigmatic and reclusive artist, through his extensive interviews with Sharp and all of his trusted friends, touching on the many dramas of life at Sharp's home studio, Wirian; his productions and search for meaning with regard to the Luna Park Fire; his spiritual search and death in 2013. 'I think what Lowell has done here is admirable, removing himself from the narrative. This book will be of interest to a wider audience who don't even know who Martin is. I predict this book will become a genuine hit.' - Peter Kingston.

As Bing Crosby once put it, Tiny Tim represents 'one of the most phenomenal success stories in show business'. In 1968, after years of playing dive bars and lesbian cabarets on the Greenwich Village scene, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Bob Dylan and Lenny Bruce, the forty-something falsetto-voiced, ukulele-playing Tiny Tim landed a recording contract with Sinatra's Reprise label and an appearance on NBC's Laugh-In. The resulting album, God Bless Tiny Tim, and its single, 'Tip-toe Thru' The Tulips With Me', catapulted him to the highest levels of fame. Soon, Tiny was playing to huge audiences in the USA and Europe, while his marriage to the seventeen-year-old 'Miss' Vicki was broadcast on The Tonight Show in front of an audience of fifty million. Before long, however, his star began to fade. Miss Vicki left him, his earnings evaporated, and the mainstream turned its back on him. He would spend the rest of his life trying to revive his career, with many of those attempts taking a turn toward the absurd. But while he is often characterized as an oddball curio, Tiny Tim was a master interpreter and student of early American popular song, and his story is one of Shakespearean tragedy framed around a bizarre yet loveable public persona. Here, drawing on dozens of new interviews, never-before-seen diaries, and years of original research, author Justin Martell brings that story to life with the first serious biography of one of the most fascinating yet misunderstood figures in popular music.

For the record, Walter Winchell admittedly wasn't a Great Guy. But that didn't particularly interest him. Whad did was that he wanted to be a Great Newsman, and become the greatest of the Great Reporters. He drove himself night and day without mercy to reach that pinnacle, and he did. He was like Man o' War going to the post. He went to the whip as he broke from the gate, and he broke a record every time out.

Draws on the previously published four-volume, "A History of the English-Speaking Peoples," as well as essays and speeches, to present the British statesman's interpretation of American history.