# The Encino Hills *A Biography of Don Cornelius* — Legendary Biographies No. 025 - **Subject:** Donald Cortez Cornelius - **Written by:** Sterling Aldridge - **Shelf:** Technology & Money / Media Business - **Published:** 2025 - **Extent:** 208 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **Paperback:** $19.99 — 6 × 9 in · 208 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback - **Hardcover:** $24.99 — 6 × 9 in · 208 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · case laminate on the same text block - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90470-021-8) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Eric Whitfield (ISBN 979-8-90623-004-1) Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/025-the-encino-hills.html ## About this book On a Saturday morning in 1971, a former Chicago insurance salesman with a baritone voice and a borrowed camera crew launched a dance show that would outlast the network executives who almost killed it in its cradle. For the next thirty-five years, Soul Train was the longest-running first-run nationally syndicated program in American television history — and the man behind it, Don Cornelius, remained its sole proprietor, host, and gatekeeper. Sterling Aldridge traces the arc of a self-made impresario who refused to let Black music and Black bodies be filtered through anyone else's lens. From the South Side studios where the show was first taped on a shoestring, to the Hollywood years when James Brown, Aretha Franklin, and a generation of new artists came through its doors, Cornelius built something the industry had insisted could not be built, and then guarded it with a discipline that bordered on austerity. Drawing on interviews with dancers, musicians, family, and former staff, Aldridge follows Cornelius across the decades that followed — the contract disputes, the health struggles, the slow loosening of his grip on a culture he had helped invent, and the private weather of a man who gave the country a weekly ride and kept very little of the journey for himself. What emerges is the portrait of a builder, and of the cost of building.
## Contents 1. South Side Son 2. The Hustler's Education 3. Get on Board 4. The Hippest Trip in America 5. The Line 6. The Sound of the City 7. The Business of Soul 8. Disco Inferno 9. The Private Man 10. The Revolution Will Be Televised 11. The Awards 12. Behind the Curtain 13. The Second Marriage 14. Black on Television 15. The Long Goodbye 16. February First 17. The Legacy Train 18. Love, Peace, and Soul 19. The Hall of Fame ## Questions **Who is The Encino Hills about?** Donald Cortez Cornelius. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Encino Hills — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 6,941 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 63,000 words, 19 chapters, 208 pages in the paperback. **What is the printed book like?** 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, perfect-bound paperback, matte laminate. Every title in the series uses the same specification, so they line up on a shelf. ## The writer Sterling Aldridge is an Atlanta-based business journalist whose work for Bloomberg Businessweek and The Wall Street Journal has focused on the founders, fraudsters, and venture capitalists of the late-stage tech industry. After years of reporting on the ground, he transitioned to writing book-length portraits of industry figureheads. His biographies, including Satoshi, On the Run, and The Monopolist, examine the human cost of rapid technological scale. Other works like The Encino Hills, The Lanai Purchase, and The Five-Day Firing focus on the high-stakes boardroom battles that define modern Silicon Valley. He has also authored The Black Turtleneck and The Glen Park Library. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia, where he spends his free time restoring midcentury modern furniture and cycling through the city's historic neighborhoods.