Frank Sanello

About the author...

Internationally known author and journalist Frank Sanello has written 20 critically acclaimed books, among them *The Opium Wars: The Addiction of One Empire and the Corruption of Another* (Sourcebooks, 2002), which after its American release was published in China, which normally despises Westerners’ often biased accounts of Chinese history; *The Knights Templars: God’s Warriors, the Devil’s Bankers* (Taylor, 2003); and *Tweakers: How Crystal Meth Is Ravaging Gay America* (Alyson, 2005).
Sanello has collaborated with nationally known academics in their areas of expertise. He cowrote *Saving America: Solutions For a Nation in Crisis* with Adel N. Shenouda, M.D., professor *emeritus* of nephrology at the University of Tennessee. The book offers Professor Shenouda’s fool-proof plan for affordable, universal health insurance.
Sanello coauthored *The Addict Next Door: The Epidemic of Prescription Painkiller Abuse and Other Contemporary Plagues* with USC Professor Jayson A. Hymes, M.D.
The author has written several biographies, among them *Steven Spielberg: The Man, the Movies, the Mythology* (Taylor 1996); *Jimmy Stewart: A Wonderful Life* (Pinnacle/Kensington, 1997); *Stallone: A Rocky Life* and *Halle Berry: A Stormy Life* (Virgin Books, 2003).
Sanello combined his love of history and films in his nonfiction compilation *Reel v. Real: How Hollywood Turns Fact Into Fiction* (Taylor, 2003), whose subtitle is more marketable but less accurate than the alternative the author suggested: *Inaccuracies in Historical Films.*
Sanello lectured on the US State Department's complicity in the Holocaust at Temple Isaiah in Palm Springs in March 2013 and has written about similar topics in magazine articles and in his *Victims and Victimizers: Gays and Lesbians in the Third Reich* (CreateSpace, 2012).
*Fractured History Tales or Why (Almost) Everything You Thought You Knew About the Past Never Happened* (CreateSpace, 2011) debunks dozens of myths almost universally accepted as historical “fact.”
Sanello's nonfiction book, *Tweakers: How Crystal Meth Is Ravaging Gay America* (Alyson, 2005) was made into a feature-length documentary in 2007. [link text][1]
A journalist for the past 35 years, Sanello has written articles for the *Washington Post*, the *New York Times Syndicate*, the *Los Angeles Time*s, the *Chicago Tribune*, the *Chicago Sun-Times*, the *Boston Globe*, the *San Francisco Chronicle*, *USA Today*, *Redbook*, *People*, *US Weekly*, *Penthouse*.
*Cosmo* and other periodicals have excerpted his books. Sanello was formerly a film reviewer for the *Los Angeles Daily News* and a business reporter for *UPI*.
The author graduated cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in English literature from the University of Chicago and earned a master’s degree from UCLA’s film school. He also holds a purple belt in Tae Kwon Do and has volunteered as a kickboxing instructor at AIDS Project Los Angeles where he taught self-defense classes for HIV/AIDS patients who had been AIDS- or fag-bashed.
Sanello lives in West Hollywood, California, and can be contacted at [email protected].
For more information about the profile photo and other issues, please contact James K. Williamson at [email protected].

*photo of Frank Sanello by James K. Williamson released by Williamson under the free license "Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported" and GNU Free Documentation License (unversioned, with no invariant sections, front-cover texts, or back-cover texts).*