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Rating: 
Summary: CORRECTION TO MY REVIEW
Review: Hi there and apologies for bothering you. Judy Bachrach has contacted me to point out that when I say an anecdote was repeated twice at the start of the book, I should in fact have said an entire quote. I know this sounds like splitting hairs, but she seems a little perturbed by this and so if you could change the review to make it 100 percent accurate I'd be very grateful. Many thanks in advance for your understanding. David Ljunggren
Rating:
Summary: Curiously uninteresting and wandering, and badly edited
Review: I don't know quite how the author has managed it, but she has produced a fairly dull book on what look to be two very interesting characters. After absorbing the pre-publication hype I was convinced this would be a rollicking no-holds barred examination of the depths Tina Brown and Harry Evans had sunk to during their years in America. It strikes me that this was the pitch the author made to the publisher but it doesn't work, for a number of reasons. As you get deeper into the book the author makes clear that whatever their personal foibles, these were in fact two very gifted people. Yes, their habits and methods were not to everyone's liking, but jeepers! Are we supposed to be surprised that a highly-strung editor of two top magazines sometimes wasn't very nice to people? This is New York, for heaven's sake. The book is surprisingly balanced in its assessment of Tina Brown and yet the author, perhaps feeling a little guilty that the portrayal isn't sharp or controversial enough, resorts to some pretty insulting copy. Do we really want to know that Tina once put on make-up badly or once turned up to a meeting with unshaven legs? Come off it. This is part of the overall problem with this work, which has clearly been put together in a hurry. It certainly needed a better editor. Within a few pages at the start at least two anecdotes are repeated verbatim and the concluding section is a real mess, just a collection of thoughts thrown down on the paper. So reader beware -- although in places this is a very interesting book, it's not the one the publicists would have you believe it to be.
Rating: 
Summary: get real
Review: I started this book with the conviction that I would finally learn what had made Tina Brown such a feared and respected editor. Unfortunately, when I finished it I was somewhat disappointed. Judy Bachrach certainly does a good job of finding disaffected former employees who dish out all sorts of dirt on Tina Brown and detail working practices and habits which seem to have caused her underlings some serious grief. But what I did not really learn was what exactly why she was brought across from London to edit first Vanity Fair and then the New Yorker. She was clearly not a charlatan, she clearly had talents, but the use to which she put them is obscured by the dirt and nastiness regularly dumped all over Brown by other people quoted in this book. As a reader of the New Yorker for the last 15 years I can say that she did indeed change it, in many ways for the better. I still have some of my old pre-Brown copies of the magazine and while they do contain the occasional excellent articles, there are also many long, long screeds about fruitflies and tomatoes and some obscure aspect of baseball which were allowed to ramble on and on. Whatever faults she may have had, Tina Brown at least turned the magazine into something I wanted to read and actually looked forward to every week. She did make mistakes (as the book makes clear) and I agree with critics who say the Diana issue was extremely ill-judged, but the magazine now is in many ways a sorry shadow of what it once was. It saddens me to say that I look forward to Harper's and Atlantic Monthly with more anticipation than I do the New Yorker. The one area where the magazine has really collapsed is the fiction section, where whoever is in charge seems to have completely given up. Almost every week it's the same thing, exceedingly well-known names writing variations on the same themes, be it Alice Munro or William Trevor or whoever else it might be. What happened to the magazine's fine old tradition of unearthing new authors? I note that Zadie Smith is now going to be writing a story for the magazine, which is a good thing, but it would have been more impressive had the magazine published her before the success of "White Teeth". Yes, there has been the odd New Fiction issue with a few new authors, but I can think of no area where the New Yorker has collapsed so miserably as in fiction. So do read Bachrach's book if you have an interest in Tina Brown and Harry Evans but don't expect an answer to all your questions.
Rating:
Summary: nasty fun
Review: This book is a nasty, in a sophistiacated 1930s sort of way. Think, Clare Booth Luce's "The Women". This book is the story of an unrelenting social climber who had genuine talent and ability on her side but little grace, humility or kindness. And it caught up with her. The book does a good job of showing why Ms. Brown has so many enemies and why she rose to such starry heights in the first place. It's great for people who love NYC, or who love journalism, or anyone who just wants a juicy piece of shameless gossip.
Rating:
Summary: nasty fun
Review: This book is a nasty, in a sophistiacated 1930s sort of way. Think, Clare Booth Luce's "The Women". This book is the story of an unrelenting social climber who had genuine talent and ability on her side but little grace, humility or kindness. And it caught up with her. The book does a good job of showing why Ms. Brown has so many enemies and why she rose to such starry heights in the first place. It's great for people who love NYC, or who love journalism, or anyone who just wants a juicy piece of shameless gossip.
Rating:
Summary: Flat Gossip, by fermed
Review: This is a book of gossip - the reliable and truthful type - about some rather dull people. It follows Tina Brown and Harry Evans from their origins in London to their adventures in Americaland. My interest in Tina Brown derives from being a longtime reader of the New Yorker, which she edited during a few crucial years during the magazine's inexorable descent into vulgarity and irrelevance. The book, however, did not satisfy my curiosity about what kind of a person would do the New Yorker that way. While it describes Tina Brown and her career quite well (not a flattering picture, for sure) it is weak about the dynamics of her tenure at the New Yorker. Not a single mention of John Updike appears, he who was reputed to have tried, more or less alone with a spade and bucket, to control Tina's diluvium. The book has poor literary quality, its prose being surprisingly colorless and flat. Unless a person has an unusual interest in the publishing industry of London or New York (dozens of second and third tier characters appear), it is hadly worth the effort of reading it.
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Summary: the seven deadly sins carry a price, but that's the bargin
Review: This story has been told and repeated since man has recorded history; the rise to power by people, in this case a couple (see - our former first couple; the Ceaucesceau's of Romania; the Milosevic's of Serbia), who seek power and dominion over all in their orbit. The limitations of their power are usually circumscribed by their ability to reach, and sway to their whim, large masses of people, and their ability to protect themselves from others who wish to do the same in their sted. Harry Evans, the son of a train engineer, former editor of the London Sunday Times and CEO of Random House, and his wife, Tina Brown, a woman 25 years his junior and former maven of Vanity Fair, have been skewered by those whom they abused on their rise to power. Their unvarnished, naked ambition, ruthlessly on display in their drive for success, fame and fortune, at all costs, has left many "broken bodies" in their wake and from what is told here, they forgot an important rule of life. "Be nice to those you meet on the way up because you're going to meet them on the way down." And from the looks of things, meeting them again does not seem high on Harry and Tina's list. Judy Bachrach, a writer for Vanity Fair, who worked for Tina Brown at same, has written a particularly virulent piece on this power couple by exploiting old wounds among their former employee's and workers. Resentment is too mild a word to describe the feelings of these former comrades who have unloaded all of their bitterness onto Ms. Bachrach who in turn has transmitted it to the world at large via "Harry and Tina come to America"; and, it seems that anyone and everyone who has had something to say has said it, and in spades. H&T's grasping for fame, their lust for power, their unabashed attempts at image control, and their need for position, is an old story. What has derailed their upward bound comet has been their ultimate inability to deliver bottom line performance in their business ventures. Their failures in this venue have brought on cracks in their edifice and their fall, once underway, has continued to accelerate at an exponential rate. Read this book and see if you can apply its lessons to your favorite biblical reference, I'm sure one is there. Judy Bachrach is to be commended for providing an avenue for so many to vent and bear witness, and in the end, "ain't that America!
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Summary: UN-PUT-DOWNABLE!
Review: Tina Brown and Harry Evans are insufficiently diabolical to fill one with the schadenfreude this cleverly written book would like to provoke. Still...I couldn't put it down! Call it "a guilty pleasure." Brown's and Evans' rise and (partial) fall, vaulting ambition, sucking-up to their betters, uncaring ruthlessness toward underlings, total self-centeredness -- all that is well and cruelly depicted. But the pathos of it all is not to be found in the price they paid in terms of diminished honor and integrity, but in the total pettiness of their concerns. Like -- who cares about the machinations of the editor of such silly enterprises as "Vanity Fair" and "Talk"? Here are two talented and well-educated people wasting their lives by devoting them to junk. Therein lies the waste. There are lessons to be learned from reading this book...and the lessons aren't pretty!
Rating:
Summary: Bitchy but amusing
Review: WHAT did Tina Brown do to Judy Bachrach? That's really the question you keep asking yourself while reading this bitchy if amusing book. Not that Ms Brown and Mr Evans don't deserve quite a bit of the stick they get here, but it is so... unrelenting. Judy Bachrach now works for Tina Brown's successor at Vanity Fair, and she applies to Tina and Harry the gossipy techniques which made VF's success. She should have applied fuller disclosure to her motives. That being said, most details here are probably accurate. Thebook is not published in the UK for fear of libel suits. Not very sportsmanlike of Tina and Harry.
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