Autumn of the Moguls: My Misadventures with the Titans, Poseurs, and Money Guys who Mastered and Messed Up Big Media - Tapa dura

‘Apparently trivial, then segues into saying something original and profound about contemporary American society. He's fearless in a way you don't often find among hacks today, chopping away at the legs of the most powerful men and women of our era like a jungle scout with a machete. He's also very funny. When he's on top form, he's as good as Tom Wolfe.’ Toby Young, Books of the Year, Observer

A riveting, barnstorming, thrilling ride through the loud, lively and all-embracing world of the modern media conglomerates – its key deals, dealmakers, divas and delusions.

The world is full of the media. The media, at times, feels like the world, or at least feels like it controls how pretty much everyone sees, views, experiences the world. It is, then, understandable, in a way, that many of those who run the media, who own and direct the ever-larger, ever-more ambitious, ever-more capable corporations, feel that they are, unambiguously and unironically, at the centre of how the world works here at the beginning of a new century. The brilliance and panache and inventiveness (and hubris) of these titans is breathtaking from afar, when seen through the lens of news (a lens they usually themselves own, of course). But, up close and personal, by all the gods, has anyone seen their like before? Well, Michael Wolff has spent his adult life as close to the titans as it’s possible to get. He even tried to be a mini-titan for a while there. He knows Rupert (Murdoch) and Barry (Diller) and Jean-Marie (Messier) and Steve (Ross) and Ted (Turner). He knows what they want, what fuels their appetites, what they can and can’t see when they look in the mirror (or the financial pages). And he tells us all he knows, in this astonishing, giddying, how-the-hell-can-this-world-survive report from the frontlines of an industry that, every month now, has to reinvent itself and rebuild the foundations on which it towers up – lest it all coming crashing down around us...