Books

COLLABORATIONS

Leave Something on the Table, and Other Surprising Lessons for Success in Business and in Life
Frank Bennack was CEO of Hearst for a mind-boggling 29 years; under his leadership Hearst revenues grew 14 times and earnings increased more than 30 times. How did he do it? He turned a magazine-and-newspaper company into a start-up. He bought TV stations. He sought out partners. And then lightning struck. One of those partners called Frank and asked if Hearst might like to buy 20 per cent of ESPN, a cable network then featuring tractor pulls. Hearst bought that 20 per cent for $167 million. ESPN is now valued at more than $40 billion. It’s not too strong to say that was the deal of the century. The owners of ESPN could have called anyone. They called Frank. Why? That is the question “Leave Something on the Table” answers. Because the underlying story of this book isn’t how a poor boy from San Antonio scaled the heights and stayed at the top for three decades, it’s that he’s the model of what a leader should be, and not just in business.

Michael Bloomberg: “Valuable lessons in leadership by a great CEO and an even better storyteller.”

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pepsi-cover-150The Other Guy Blinked: How Pepsi Won the Cola Wars
Why did Coca Cola come out with New Coke, the biggest marketing disaster of the decade? Because Pepsi-Cola had commercials starring Michael Jackson. 90% of the American people saw those commercials many times. Pepsi sales boomed. Coke had to do something. That is the thesis of this remarkable inside account of the cola wars, as told by Roger Enrico, the marketing genius who was the CEO of Pepsi..
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tharp-cover-150The Collaborative Habit: Life Lessons for Working Together
Twyla Tharp, the genius choreographer, is a perfectionist. “If you’re not early, you’re late,” she told me when we started to work on this book. I made sure to be early. And listen carefully. And learn so much. As will Twyla’s readers.

Booklist: “If collaboration is truly the buzzword of the millennium, consider Twyla Tharp as standard-bearer, motivator, and philosopher.”

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The New Megatrends: Seeing Clearly in the Age of Disruption
Since co-founding the world’s first online market research company, Marian Salzman has served as a communications executive at companies in the United States and Europe. In this book, she explains the most consequential shifts underway: “our warming planet, pervasive forces of chaos and uncertainty, and the evolving battle for supremacy between the world’s two 21st-century superpowers, the United States and China.” Even more valuable, she digs into the forces shaping how we live.

Gus Wenner, CEO, Rolling Stone: “Wise, witty, and compulsively readable.”

 

North of Havana: The Untold Story of Dirty Politics, Secret Diplomacy, and the Trial of the Cuban Five
Legendary First Amendment and trial lawyer Martin Garbus tells the story of a spy ring sent by Cuba in the early 1990s to infiltrate anti-Communist extremists in Miami, so Cuba could present the evidence of these extremists to the FBI. Instead, the U.S. government erroneously charged the Cuban spies for the 1996 shootdown of two planes circulating anti-Castro leaflets over Havana. In the absence of evidence, they were convicted in 2000 of conspiracy to commit espionage and murder. Caught up in the sweep of history, the Cuban Five played a central role over the next decade in the recent thaw in Cuban-American relations — and Martin Garbus was a crucial advocate in getting them released.

Publishers Weekly: “Dramatic history and memoir… fearless and essential.”

 

NON-FICTION

milken-cover-150Highly Confident: The Crime and Punishment of Michael Milken
In 1987, Michael Milken earned $550 million. In 1988, when the government wanted to put him in jail and that paycheck was publicized, many people assumed he had to be a crook. Later, he was convicted and jailed. Was justice done? I spent 400 hours interviewing Milken and his colleagues. I had l0,000 pages of leaked documents. What I wrote was a minute by minute prosecution of the greatest manhunt in Wall Street history.

Publishers Weekly: “This taut, riveting account of Wall Street’s biggest scandal reads like a thriller…  a stunning tale of greed and self-deception packed with revelations and reconstructed conversations.”

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airborne-cover-150Airborne: The Triumph and Struggle of Michael Jordan
In 1993, Michael Jordan wasn’t giving many interviews, but he saw me because I came from Vanity Fair and that was his wife’s favorite magazine. I converted that article into a bestselling book for young readers.

 

 

 

Pre-Pop Warhol
After I wrote the New York Magazine cover story about the death of Andy Warhol, I wasn’t surprised to be asked to do a book. Happily, it was a picture-and-text, coffee table book that showcased the commercial art Andy made before he got famous. The cover is like no other: corrugated cardboard. The pages are just as beautifully designed.
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underround-cover-150Notes From the New Underground
In 1997, before my senior year in college, I got a book contract and edited an anthology of pieces from the “underground” press. At 22, I published my first book.
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NOVELS

JFK AND MARY MEYER: A LOVE STORY
From January 1962 until his death, John F. Kennedy had one constant lover: Mary Pinchot Meyer, a family friend and a frequent guest at White House dinners. Like his wife, she was expensively educated and socially prominent — but she was more adventurous, opinionated, and sensual.

On October 12, 1964, eleven months after Kennedy’s assassination and two days before her forty-fourth birthday, Mary took her noon walk along the towpath of the Chesapeake and Ohio canal in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington. A gunman shot her, execution style, in the head and the heart. An African American man was arrested, tried, and acquitted. Her murder remains unsolved.

That night, Mary’s best friend, then living in Japan, urgently called Mary’s sister Tony and Tony’s husband, Ben Bradlee. “Mary had a diary,” she said. “Please get it and secure it.” Eventually, the Bradlees found a small notebook, mostly filled with paint swatches, sketches, and shorthand ideas for her art—and no more than ten pages about an affair with an unnamed lover. The Bradlees burned the notebook. My novel — based on extensive research and personal knowledge of Mary’s world — is the diary I imagine she might have written.

Tina Brown: “A delicious, gripping recreation of a compelling mystery told in a voice full of secrets and charm… a page-turner brought alive by expert social detail and poignant insights.”

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Married Sex
Blair is a college dean. David is a divorce lawyer. They live on Central Park West in an apartment they couldn’t afford now. Best of all, they’re still hot for one another. A dream marriage? Pretty much. They’ve even invented a simple way to beat the curse of adultery, the #1 marriage killer: If you’re tempted to cheat, bring that person home. It never happens. But a few weeks after their daughter goes off to college…

New York Times: a skillfully written, lighthearted and clever story that manages to be steamy but never salacious… Kornbluth has a screenwriter’s ear for witty banter, and the novel hinges on the charming voice of its narrator.”

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AND ALSO….

know-cover-150

Now You Know: Reactions After Seeing Saving Private Ryan
When I was Editorial Director of America Online, I saw books early. Among them was a photography book about Steven Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan.” I looked at the pictures and cried. I knew others would too, so I built a special feature about the film before it opened — and asked for AOL members to share their reactions to the movie and their war memories. 30,000 people posted that first weekend, and AOL became the home of the national conversation about the movie.
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americans-cover-150Because We Are Americans: What We Discovered on September 11, 2001
After 9/11, many AOLK members  people shared their feelings and memories on our message boards.  In that dark September, we fulfilled the mission of an online service. We served.
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HeadButler.com: The 100 Essentials: Books, music and movies for people with more taste than time.
Most of the books that are published aren’t edited well and may not be worth editing. Most of the music that’s hyped will bore you in a month. But almost everything ever published, recorded or filmed is available on the Internet, and a lot of that old or overlooked or just plain unknown stuff is really good. That, anyway, is what I thought when I launched HeadButler.com in 2004. A decade later, I collected my 100 favorites.
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dickens-cover-250A Christmas Carol
The Charles Dickens classic may be the second greatest Christmas story ever told, but have you tried to read it to a child? I did — and my eight-year-old daughter begged me to stop after 5 minutes. Why? Because Dickens wrote “A Christmas Carol” in 1843, when language and pacing were much different. So I found the obvious solution: I cut the 28,000-word original in half. I didn’t butcher Dickens, I didn’t rewrite him. I just edited the story so what the reader gets is …the story. A gifted artist, Paige Peterson, contributed illustrations that give you the feel of that chill of that London winter. And now, I think, it’s a pleasure — and a thrill — for children and adults to read.
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