Harvey Rachlin is an award-winning author of fourteen books and hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles. His first book, The Songwriter’s Handbook (Funk and Wagnalls), sold over 50,000 hardcover copies in thirteen printings, and was the best-selling book on the subject for many years. It is endorsed on the back cover by the Academy Award–winning songwriters Burt Bacharach, Sammy Cahn (who wrote the book’s foreword), Marvin Hamlisch, Henry Mancini, Richard Rodgers, and Jule Styne.
Rachlin’s second book, The Encyclopedia of the Music Business (Harper & Row), won the ASCAP–Deems Taylor Award for excellence in music journalism, was named Outstanding Music Reference Book of the Year by the American Library Association, was recommended by Oscar-winning composer Henry Mancini (“Moon River”) on behalf of CBS Television and the Library of Congress on the internationally-televised Grammy Awards show, and is included on the U.S. Copyright Office’s “Selected Bibliography for Musicians.” The book is praised on the back cover by Elton John, Johnny Mathis, Pat Boone, and Morton Gould.
Another of Rachlin’s books, Lucy’s Bones, Sacred Stones and Einstein’s Brain (Henry Holt), was made into the long-running smash-hit History Channel series History’s Lost and Found, narrated by actor Edward Herrmann (of Gilmore Girls fame) and introduced on the network by the renowned television journalist Roger Mudd. Rachlin co-wrote the three pilot episodes, which broke ratings records for the History Channel and won the Cine Golden Eagle Award for Best History Series.
Rachlin’s books have been translated into Korean, Spanish, German, and Polish and have been selections of the Book-of-the-Month Club, Quality Paperback Book Club, History Book Club, Encyclopedia Britannica Home Library, Fireside Theatre Book Club and Writer’s Digest Book Club. His books have been reviewed in such publications as the New York Times Book Review, Los Angeles Times Book Review, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Seattle Times, Orlando Sentinel, Detroit Free Press, Chicago Tribune, New York Daily News, New York Post, Miami Herald, Baltimore Sun, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Boston Herald, Washington Post Book World, Dayton Daily News, The Oklahoman, Indianapolis Star, Chicago Sun-Times, Salt Lake City Tribune, Virginian-Pilot, Baton Rouge Advocate, Nashville Banner, Charlotte Observer, A&E Monthly, Money Magazine, Parade, Variety, and Entertainment Weekly.
Harvey Rachlin has appeared on hundreds of radio shows and several national television shows including The Late, Late Show with Tom Snyder (CBS), The Dinah Shore Show, The Joe Franklin Show and The Sally Jessy Raphael Show, and he has been profiled in many major newspapers including the New York Times (twice), Boston Herald, Indianapolis Star and Newsday. Other luminaries who have endorsed his books include President Gerald R. Ford, Dave Powers (Special Assistant to President John F. Kennedy), Aaron Copland, Barbara Eden, Estelle Getty, movie producer Samuel Z. Arkoff, best-selling true-crime author Nicholas Pileggi, and Sonny Grosso (the “French Connection” detective).
For his first police book, The Making of a Cop (Pocket Books/Simon & Schuster), Rachlin went through the NYPD Police Academy where he followed a small group of recruits through the rigorous training process; that book was optioned for a theatrical motion picture by Longbow Productions, producer of the girls’ baseball movie A League of Their Own. For his second police book, The Making of a Detective (W.W. Norton hardcover, Dell paperback), he followed one of the NYPD’s most skillful young investigators as he earned his gold shield in New York City’s most dangerous precinct, the “Seven-Five,” in East New York, Brooklyn; that book received a starred review in Publishers Weekly and was featured on the national television show Good Morning America.
With his next three books, Harvey Rachlin carved out a niche for himself as a writer of quirky history books. In Lucy’s Bones, Sacred Stones and Einstein’s Brain (Henry Holt hardcover, Owl Books paperback) and Jumbo’s Hide, Elvis’s Ride, and the Tooth of Buddha (Henry Holt hardcover, Owl Books paperback), he uses historical artifacts to recount riveting and often little-known episodes of the past. He does much the same with paintings in Scandals, Vandals and da Vincis: A Gallery of Remarkable Art Tales (Penguin paperback). In devising a way to come up with original true stories about masterpieces, he may have pioneered a new literary genre, the “art tale.” The Spanish Edition of this book, Tras Las Obras Maestras, is cited in the closing credits of the Spanish-language documentary El Guernica de Pablo Picasso (Mexico, 2012) as a bibliographic source.
In Color War: Dinshah P. Ghadiali’s Battle with the Medical Establishment over his Revolutionary Light-Healing Science (Amsterdam Publishing, paperback), published February 2018, Harvey Rachlin and his brother Steven M. Rachlin, M.D., an internist who specializes in complementary and alternative medicine, tell the compelling story of a Parsee Indian who fought the medical establishment over his Spectro-Chrome Therapy science.
In his most recent book, Song and System: The Making of American Pop Music (Rowman & Littlefield, hardcover), released March 1, 2020, Harvey Rachlin investigates how music entered American homes and established a cultural institution that would expand throughout the decades to become a multibillion dollar industry, weaving a history of the evolution of pop music in tandem with the music business. The book is praised on the back cover by several music luminaries: Tony Orlando, Bobby Rydell, Janis Ian, Sandy Linzer (cowriter of numerous hit songs including “Working My Way Back to You” and “A Lover’s Concerto”), and Dutch Robinson, lead singer of the Ohio Players.
Rachlin has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Daily News, The Times (London), The Jerusalem Post, The Writer, Law and Order, Westchester Magazine and Publishers Weekly, and is a regular contributor to School Band and Orchestra and Choral Director magazines. He has also been a longtime contributor to Songwriter magazine, for which he has profiled such iconic tunesmiths as Irving Caesar (“Tea for Two” and “Swanee,” written with George Gershwin); Johnny Marks (“Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”), Charles Strouse (Bye Bye Birdie and Annie), Stephen Schwartz (Wicked, Pippin, Godspell), Larry Weiss (“Rhinestone Cowboy,” “Bend Me, Shape Me”), Sandy Linzer (“Dawn,” “A Lover’s Concerto,” Native New Yorker”), Chip Taylor (“Wild Thing,” “Angel of the Morning”) and Ron Miller (“For Once in My Life,” “Yester-You, Yester-Me, Yesterday,” “Touch Me in the Morning”). His books are cited in numerous law reviews and used in AP high school and college courses around the country, and he has lectured at many universities and town hall meetings including at the University of Michigan, University of California at Santa Barbara, San Diego State University, and the State Historical Society of Wisconsin.
Rachlin has written hundreds of pop tunes and instrumentals. He co-wrote the score to a locally produced musical comedy called The Fettuccini Affair (written by Barbara Masry), and one of his compositions, “Le Bontemp Roulé,” was performed and recorded by the Long Island Guitar and Mandolin Orchestra. He currently runs the Music Business program at Manhattanville College in Purchase, New York.
Rachlin’s two fondest career remembrances? Being given a poignant tour by Senator Edward M. Kennedy of his Washington, D.C., Senate office with all its Kennedy family memorabilia; and befriending Broadway composer Richard Rodgers (Oklahoma!, South Pacific, The King and I, The Sound of Music), with whom he enjoyed a friendly correspondence and an unforgettable twenty-minute one-to-one private meeting at the Rodgers and Hammerstein office on Madison Avenue near the end of the legendary composer’s life.
Harvey Rachlin’s CV (pdf)
Harvey Rachlin’s Full Booklist (pdf)