Autumn of the Moguls: My Misadventures With the Titans, Poseurs, and Money Guys Who Mastered and Messed Up Big Media

There is no more astute, brutally honest, and entertaining chronicler of assorted media-world implosions than New York magazine's National Magazine Award-winning columnist Michael Wolff. As once-mighty media empires -- and reputations -- have teetered and fallen over the past several years, Wolff has sorted through the wreckage (which he had often foretold) and fearlessly deconstructed the peculiar psychology behind the mess: the delusional ambitions of moguls -- and their yes-men -- whose outsized ambitions and empire-building ways have brought the media business to the brink of ruin. A former media entrepreneur himself (he told the story of the rise and fall of his own formidable Internet company in his best-selling memoir, Burn Rate), Wolff has had a ringside seat as the conglomeratized worlds of newspapers, magazines, television, radio, and the Internet have taken often bewildering turns.

In Autumn of the Moguls, a funny, frank, and incendiary account, Michael Wolff explains it all, taking on the great (and not-so-great) characters of the age, including AOL Time Warner's Gerald Levin, Steve Case, Bob Pittman, and Walter Isaacson; New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr.; News Corp.'s Rupert Murdoch; Viacom's Sumner Redstone and Mel Karmazin; media empress Martha Stewart; would-be media empress Tina Brown; legendary kahuna Barry Diller; media-mogul-turned-New-York-City mayor Michael Bloomberg; and Disney czar Michael Eisner. Also scrutinized is an outrageous cast of self-proclaimed creative geniuses, short-sighted (and often short) financiers, and shameless politicians who attempt and frequently succeed in manipulating the media.

Autumn of the Moguls is the book that will forever change your perception of how the media works, plays, and perhaps even survives its own worst excesses.