Rating: 
Summary: Eye opener for small investors
Review: Munk's book reads like a fast paced novel and is easy enough to understand. It has not received the publicity of books like 'Good to Great' although in many ways it provides fundamental information on how big business is really conducted- for the benefit of pushy and powerful owners, managers and special interests.
Read this book to get real insight into how compliant board members and clueless senior management can wreck your 401K account. If an insider like Ted Turner could lose $ 8 billion in a three year period, where does it leave Joe Blow who plans to retire on his stock market investments?
Munk's book surprised even a cynic like myself- how could 2 persons deceive and mislead so many professionals and investors and evaporate $ 200 billion in less than 3 years? If this story does not provoke actionable investigations into the effectivness of oversight and toothlessnes of the legal system (to protect investors), I am not sure what will. In this regard, it is a very valuable read.
Rating: 
Summary: An Entertaining Read
Review: Nina Munk does a great job telling the entertaining story of this mega-merger debacle. It's a quick read and a sobering look at how major corporate deals are done: ego-driven executives make life-altering decisions on a whim, approved by a board of yes-men and women and a few key institutional shareholders. So little thought went into this deal, especially on the part of Time Warner. The alleged "due diligence" done by the companies and their outside "advisors" is particularly shameful. Might have received 5 stars, but I was surprised by the number of typos and grammatical errors that made it through the editing process (at least a dozen by my count). Note to HarperBusiness: make sure the cake is baked before you take it out of the oven and serve it.
Rating: 
Summary: Great reporting of an important business and cultural story
Review: Nina Munk has done us a very fine service in reporting this important story. The strange time we went through that allowed people like Jerry Levin, Steve Case, and others to become oulandishly compensated and nearly all-powerful executives should be a cautionary tale for generations to come. It is just weird to read how these folks worked, what they thought and believed, and how they try and justify it today.The book is a lively read. It is not a business book laden with numbers (which I would probably have enjoyed even more - but that's me). Instead, it is a story of personalities with just enough numbers to orient the reader to the fantasy world these executives fled to. In fact, this really couldn't have been a story told with hard numbers - because there really wasn't very much solid at the core of these valuations. Ms Munk does a fine job of reporting what those involved thought and did. She did a lot of first hand interviewing to get some of the best information. She also provides good notes and sources for what she reports in the book. This isn't a simple rehash of news stories, although the outlines of the story will be familiar to anyone who did follow these events in the news. Personally, I found the destruction of the Time magazine morgue as a cost cutting move both horrifying and a perfect example of the cultural blindness that afflicts far to many of those who justify any behavior if they can use it to raise the stock price. We have to demand that they attend to something more than price manipulation in their running of these great publicly held institutions. Not through government regulation, but as shareholders, we need to make sure that these folks realize it is not okay to burn down a library full of priceless information to save a fraction of a cent per share of cost. Thanks to Nina Munk!
Rating:
Summary: Right on the mark
Review: She is totally on the mark here. How these two cultures thought they could make a deal is beyond me. I give Nina five stars for depicting these clowns so vividly.
Rating:
Summary: Gossipy but convincing
Review: There's an Epilogue to this book about the year 2000 acquisition of Time-Warner by that most overvalued of the Internet phenomena, America On-Line. Despite it's being a coda to an account of what may have been history's most disastrous business transaction, this Epilogue consists of updates on 30 or so of the principal personalities involved (along with two corporate entities, one building, and one painting). The structure and content of the Epilogue emphasize that this is largely a gossip-column approach to business history. Author Nina Munk's great accomplishment is that she convinces us that this is exactly the correct approach. Munk quickly traces the early history of Time, Inc. through the attitudes and accomplishments of its founder, Henry Luce. Then, using the biographical methodology she will employ throughout, she introduces the most fascinating of the drama's players, Gerald Levin, and exploits his early career to bring the story through Time's 1989 merger with Warner Communications. Along the way, other key characters such as Steve Ross (Warner's builder and CEO) and Ted Turner are profiled using Munk's by now standard technique. (I began to be surprised if a new player was introduced without my finding out what his or her father had done for a living.) A parallel section on AOL and its founder, Steve Case, follows. Then "The Big Deal" itself and its aftermath are examined in sections that are rich in personality-conflict, jealousy, culture-clash. But don't expect that detail to provide any great depth on the business/economic/strategic issues involved, although these are given some necessary attention. As explanatory factors, they are persuasively made subsidiary to the personalities of Levin, Case, and their cronies. It is not news that many corporations both large and small are run as fiefdoms subservient to the whims of their chief executive. But if further proof is needed that "responsibility to shareholders" has become an American myth, this book can provide it. Case and Levin enjoyed spectacular early successes. At no point in Munk's account does either ask how much of a role good luck or the confluence of favorable circumstances may have played in those successes. To both principals (and to most of the others portrayed here), their success proved their own genius and assured future triumphs. As evidence to the contrary began to mount, they each forged ahead with no deviation in their individual and increasingly incongruous plans. Munk details the hubris, but she only hints at alternative or larger explanations of how events unfolded. She does place a significant spotlight on the role of advertising revenues. At AOL, the need for this category of income slowly undermines Steve Case's avowed idealism -- of creating something profound that will benefit society. A similar, though less intense, history unfolds at Time, Inc. This suggests a way of looking at the history of media in general. A promising new medium (radio, publishing, television, the Web) is established and its prime mover is motivated by the desire to do social good, to change the way people think or interact. But then economic realities intrude, causing a greater and greater focus on publicity, marketing, and promotion instead of content. Advertising departments come to dominate decision-making, corrupting and degrading the medium, thus draining it of all social value. Somebody - perhaps one of Vance Packard's descendants -- should write a book about that!
Rating:
Summary: Great Book
Review: This book is a great read. It gives an in depth history of Time, the Warner, then AOL. Then it goes through how they became one, and what happened after the merger. The only thing that I found is that there are so many people that were apart of the merger and the history that towards the end you start having to go back and figure out who this person was, or who that person what. There were over 50 people who it gives the history of. I did find it a lot easier to sort them out on the second read. But over all I would say for someone who would like to know what happened this is a great start.
Rating:
Summary: Overpriced and overhyped
Review: This is an article masquerading as a book. When the price drops to the price of a newsstand magazine, as the towering remainder pile suggests it will any day now, pick up a copy. Until then, read the Vanity Fair excerpt.
Rating:
Summary: Revealing, Entertaining, Funny, and Insightful
Review: This is an excellent book. Not only does it reveal the reasons for one of the worlds greatest business disasters but it does it in a very entertaining way. I found myself laughing out loud at some of the stories showing the incredible stupidity of Steve Case, Ted Turner, and Jerry Levin. The arrogance here was incredible. Although the book is over 300 pages I felt it went way too fast. I would have loved to read another 300 pages. In the end there was one good thing that came out of this disaster. It emptied Ted Turners pockets of the money he would have used to promote liberal social causes. One for the Good Guys!
Rating:
Summary: Don't Trust Senior Managements and Boards of Directors
Review: This is an excellent stroy that all senior business people should read. It exposes the foolishness and vanity that drives so many mergers and it nicely captures how infatuated managers then present these deals to investors and employees as strategic necessities. The book does a fine job of illustrating just how little rigorous thought and analyses (at least on Time Warner's part) went into this massive deal and how completely the Board of Directors failed in its basic responsibilities to scrutinize the transaction and supervise its besotted ceo. I am a money manager and I have given this book to my colleagues with the advice that they never assume that the heads of our large corporations and their Boards of Directors know what they are doing.
Rating:
Summary: Overpriced and overhyped
Review: This is an infectious read. The book itself is beautifully presented and Nina Munk writes like an angel. Well, if you're not Jerry Levin, et al., she does. She has a knack for making the words flow and the personalities as vivid as the sights of childhood. Her hard-edged but clean and crisp style will be widely imitated I predict. Her ability to research and to sift through the results of that research and to lay it all out in such an intriguing way is something close to amazing. I really don't give two hoots about Steve Case, Jerry Levin, the old Luce culture ("I am biased in favor of God, Eisenhower and the stockholders," p. 7), the Warner Bros. legacy (sleazy ethics and "foul tongues" and rumored "Mafia connections," p. 35), the dot com upstarts ("You people really need to start moving at Internet speed," p. 231), etc., but Munk makes it fascinating, like egomaniacs twisting in the wind, so to speak. But this story isn't just about AOL Time Warner but about corporate America in general, about how merger mania and golden parachuted moguls can play fast and loose with our money, our livelihood, our country, and our future. It's about the collateral damage, the megalomania, the broken hearts and the evaporated portfolios. It's about the mentality of corporate CEOs like Levin who as he turned sixty wanted to be remembered for something other than the bottom line, "for integrity...high moral principles; and wisdom." (p. 133) Ah, yes, a lifetime of chasing money and power and now True Religion. One is reminded of Bill Gates with the very demanding problem of how to distribute all that money wisely before he dies. Munk knows these people. How she got them to be so carelessly candid at times amazes me, especially her work with Levin. She understands their psychology and to some significant extent, their business. She had to, to write this book and make it work. She packs the text with spiffy and sometimes all too revealing quotes. She has the heart of a baggy-eyed scholar and the soul of a muckraker. The almost surrealistic give and take between Case and Levin as they cooked The Deal reads like something out of a Hollywood movie. Whose ego, whose sense of personal power, and imagined historical accomplishment and brilliance needed massaging the most by whom? And who would steal more from the other? And the ease with which Salomon Smith Barney and Morgan Stanley each got $60-million for their part in the deal reads like tales of manna falling from heaven. There are some black and white photos in the middle of the book. The test is exquisitely edited and proofed, and the book handsomely designed. Munk ends this "morality play," as she calls it, with a curtain call of the cast of characters in an epilogue and brings us up to date on what has happened to them and what they're doing now. Incidentally, my subject-line quote about a "mess of porridge" is from Robert Murdoch, no doubt licking his chops. (p. 280) Bottom line: you will be kept up at night reading this page turner. Better yet take it on that trip to Singapore. It's a jet-lag killer.
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