American Rhapsody

  If the Watergate scandal was a previous generation's National Nightmare, then maybe the Clinton scandal was our National Wet Dream, and who better to narrate it than the screenwriter Joe Eszterhas?  In American Rhapsody, Eszterhas, whose credits include Basic Instinct and Showgirls, and Charlie Simpson's Apocalypse, for which he was nominated for a National Book Award, takes us through the events that threatened to topple a president and left most of the nation's citizens with, at the very least, a bad taste in their mouths. 
   Taking full advantage of his considerable journalistic and storytelling talents, Eszterhas gives us every fact, rumor, or innuendo surrounding the president's foibles in the context of late century American politics and entertainment.  Here Washington and Hollywood do more than just flirt with each other; they share the same bed.  From scandalmongers Matt Drudge (who began as a Hollywood gossip) and Ken Starr, to would-be president paramours Sharon Stone and Barbra Streisand, to his final, unimpeachable witness, Willard—none other than President Clinton's talking penis—Eszterhas gives us the goods on the story that nobody could stop talking about and, thanks to American Rhapsody, will be impossible to think about the same way again.

"This is a truly naughty book, but it is also a strangely moral one." -Talk

"Part tell-all, part fiction, part rant, part history.  It's all wicked and witty and hard to ignore." - The Denver Post

"A fact-based, ranting, rocking -and-rolling screed with none of the full-frontal scissored out... a long yell of protest... extremely funny." - Christopher Hitchens,  The New York Times Book ReviewJoe Eszterhas was born in Hungary, spent his first six years in Austrian refugee camps, and came to the United States in 1950.  He lives in Point Dume, California, with his wife Naomi and their three children.  He has two grown children from his first marriage.  

He has been awarded the Emanuel Foundation's Lifetime Achievement Award for work dedicated to the memory of the holocaust in Hungary. He has also won awards for attending every one of his son's Little League games and for writing Showgirls (the Hollywood Women's Press Association's Sour Apple Award).