A sordid family and journalistic history.
A mogul's downward spiral.
Journalist Wolff, author of a spate of books skewering the dysfunctional Trump presidency, returns to his investigation of the Murdochs with a fast-paced, gossip-filled recounting of family drama—rivaling Succession in intrigue and bitter strife—and the travails and scandals that have roiled Fox News. In focusing on the media giant, though, the author is concerned “less about what is on the air, than what is in its heart, or churning in its stomach. Here is a television story of ego, money, power, and the unnatural obsession to be on the air.” His goal, he adds, “is to bring to life the contradictory forces that now tear at the network.” Those forces are not limited to the enmity between Murdoch’s sons James and Lachlan and the machinations of their sister, Elisabeth, but includes the late, disgraced Roger Ailes, an arch-manipulator; Ailes loyalist Sean Hannity, “addicted to airtime and the sound of his own voice”; self-aggrandizing Tucker Carson; the recent Dominion lawsuit that cost the company hundreds of millions; and Murdoch himself, “disconcertingly inarticulate, seemingly stuck in a zeitgeist and emotional time warp, and barely able to function outside of his closed circle of henchmen.” Wolff is merciless in his characterization of Murdoch’s sons: Lachlan, weak and indecisive; James, simply “a prick”—supercilious, needing “to justify whatever choices he’s made and actions he’s taken as being of a higher order than everyone else’s. He is aided in this by a natural hostility and overweening smugness and a punch-before-getting-punched spirit.” Wolff weaves verbatim conversations, the inner thoughts of his melodramatic protagonists, and his own wide-ranging speculations to predict the eventual fall of Murdoch’s empire. Now 92, Rupert is “shaded by doubt, ambivalence, regret, and bafflement, and the harsh and clanging voices of his children. Not the best mindset with which to hold a kingdom.”
A sordid family and journalistic history.Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2023
ISBN: 9781250879271
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2023
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
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