Watch on YouTubeBooks
Book reviews
The books behind the business of entertainment, finance and dealmaking. Every commission from these links goes to the American Cancer Society.
50 reviews · newest first
The Soundtrack of My LifeThe Lawyer Who Learned to HearClive Davis was a corporate lawyer at Columbia Records with no musical training whatsoever when he was made head of the label almost by accident. He then went to the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, watched Janis Joplin, and understood that the business he had just inherited was about to be replaced.
The Culture CodeSafety Is the SignalGive a team of business school students a set of spaghetti and marshmallows and ask them to build the tallest possible tower. Now give the same task to a team of kindergarteners.
The Bond KingThe Man Who Invented a Market and Then Left ItBill Gross did not just run the world's largest bond fund. He substantially invented the idea that bonds were something you traded actively at all — and in doing so built PIMCO from a sleepy Californian outpost into a firm managing close to two trillion dollars.
MoneyballThe Book That Changed How Everyone Values AnythingThe Oakland Athletics had roughly a third of the payroll of the New York Yankees and kept winning anyway. Moneyball is the explanation, and it is not really about baseball.
Who Is Michael Ovitz?The Other Side of the TableThere is a particular kind of book that only exists because someone got tired of being described by other people.
That Will Never WorkThe Co-Founder Nobody RemembersEveryone knows Netflix was Reed Hastings. Fewer people know that the man who came up with it, built it, and ran it as its first chief executive was Marc Randolph — and that within a few years he was out.
BlockbustersWhy Spreading Your Bets Is the Riskier StrategyEverything you were taught about diversification is wrong in this one industry, and Anita Elberse has the numbers to prove it.
The Intelligent InvestorThe Book That Survived EverythingWarren Buffett has called this the best book on investing ever written, and has been saying so for roughly seventy years. He was Graham's student at Columbia and then his employee, and the chapters he singles out — eight and twenty — are the ones about temperament rather than technique.
No Rules RulesThe Culture Doctrine, and Its CostsNetflix's culture deck circulated a million and a half times before anyone wrote a book about it. Sheryl Sandberg called it one of the most important documents to come out of Silicon Valley. It was a slide deck.
Plain & Simple Guide to Music PublishingThe Short Book on the Complicated HalfThere are two copyrights in every song. One in the recording, one in the composition. Most people in the music business understand the first one reasonably well and the second one barely at all.
Jump In!Selling T-Shirts on Venice Beach to Owning the FormatMark Burnett arrived in Los Angeles in 1982 with about six hundred dollars, no contacts, and a recently completed tour with the British Parachute Regiment. His first job in America was as a live-in nanny in Beverly Hills. His second was selling T-shirts on Venice Beach.
Bargaining with the DevilWhen Not to NegotiateEvery negotiation book on this shelf teaches you how to negotiate. This one asks a prior question that the others largely skip: should you be negotiating at all?
Principles for Dealing with the Changing World OrderThe Pattern Behind the HeadlinesRay Dalio built the largest hedge fund in the world by trying to understand what he calls the machine — the mechanical relationships underneath economic outcomes. This book applies that instinct to five hundred years of history.
The Ride of a LifetimeThe Memoir That Events Overtook TwiceThis is a book about how to leave well, written by a man who then did not leave.
Artist Management for the Music BusinessThe Textbook for the Job Nobody Trains ForAn artist manager is, functionally, a chief executive, chief financial officer, agent, therapist and crisis manager for a business whose only asset is a person who did not ask to run a business.
Hope for FilmDispatches from the Independent FrontlineTed Hope produced somewhere north of seventy independent films — Ang Lee's early work, American Splendor, In the Bedroom, 21 Grams — during the period when American independent cinema went from a movement to an industry to a problem.
Amazon UnboundThe Company That Ate EverythingThe Everything Store ended with Amazon as a large retailer with interesting ambitions. Amazon Unbound covers what happened next, which is that it became one of the most powerful institutions on earth and its founder became the richest man alive.
The Big Picture: Money and Power in HollywoodThe Machine Behind the MoviesTwo books on this shelf are called The Big Picture. One is by Ben Fritz and is about the collapse of the old studio model. This is the other one — Edward Jay Epstein's, from 2005 — and it is the book that explains the model before it collapsed.
The Big PictureWhat the Sony Hack Revealed About the Movie BusinessIn late 2014, someone broke into Sony Pictures and dumped the contents of the studio onto the internet. Most of the coverage went to the embarrassing emails about movie stars.
The Wealth CreatorsA Snapshot Taken at the Exact Wrong MomentThe data in this book is anchored to the beginning of 2000. Nearly three hundred billionaires in the United States, five million millionaires, total household wealth of thirty-seven trillion dollars — up from just over eight trillion when Reagan took office.
A Concise Handbook of Movie Industry EconomicsThe Academic VersionAlmost everything written about the film business is written by people in it. This book is written by economists who are not, and that is precisely its value.
TractionThe Operating System for a Company That Has Outgrown Its Founder's HeadThere is a specific stage in a growing business where everything that worked stops working. The founder can no longer hold the whole thing in their head, the team is arguing about priorities that were never written down, and every problem escalates to the same person.
Movie MoneyThe Manual for Reading a Studio's BooksEvery few years a well-known actor or writer sues a studio, claiming that a film which grossed hundreds of millions of dollars has somehow, according to the studio's own accounting, never turned a profit — and that their share of "net profit" is therefore zero.
RangeThe Case Against Starting EarlyTiger Woods had a putter in his hands before he could walk. Roger Federer played squash, badminton, skiing and football, and did not commit to tennis until his teens, by which point his mother — a tennis coach — had deliberately declined to coach him.
The Last SultanThe Diplomat's Son Who Built Atlantic RecordsAhmet Ertegun was the son of the Turkish ambassador to Washington. He grew up in embassies, spoke several languages, collected art, and moved through the highest end of international society for sixty years.
The BizThe Man Who Wrote the IRS's TextbookMost people who write the standard work on an industry love that industry. Sky Moore does not go to the cinema. He does not own a television. He told me, on the record, that he could not care less about the talent or the films — to him it is simply a business, and he would just as happily have done motorcycles if Los Angeles had had a motorcycle industry.
Music: The BusinessThe UK Industry's Standard TextEvery industry has one book that turns up on every reading list, sits on every desk, and gets replaced every few years when the law moves. For the British music business, this is it.
Never Split the DifferenceStop CompromisingSplitting the difference feels fair. It is how reasonable people end an argument, and it is how a great many deals get done.
A Curious MindThe Discipline Behind the Deal FlowEvery senior person I know says they value curiosity. Almost none of them have put it in the calendar.
The Kremlin School of NegotiationLearn to Hold Your GroundMost negotiation books are written by people who want you to win warmly. Get to yes, expand the pie, find the shared interest. It is good advice and I use it most days.
The Hollywood Economist 2.0The Studios Do Not Make Money the Way You ThinkHere is a fact that reorganises how you read every box-office number you will ever see: for most of the modern studio era, the ticket sales were never where the money was.
Entertainment Industry EconomicsThe Only Reference Book This Industry HasEvery other book on this list tells you a story. This one tells you the numbers.
Dissecting The Digital DollarThe Book That Explains Where Your Streaming Money GoesAt the launch of the original report, Chris Cooke put two slides on the screen.
Hello, He LiedA Survival Guide to an Industry That DiedThis is a 1996 field manual for getting a film made in Hollywood, written by one of the best producers of that era, and almost none of its practical advice still applies.
The Gnomes of ZurichA Guide to a Country That No Longer ExistsLet me be direct about this one, because it would be dishonest not to be.
Walt Disney: An American OriginalThe Authorised Life, and Why That MattersThis is the biography the Disney family cooperated with, written by a veteran Associated Press Hollywood correspondent who had covered the man for years.
The Rise and Rise of David GeffenThe Unauthorised First DraftThere are two Geffen biographies on this shelf and neither was welcome. Tom King's The Operator, covered here, is the long one — 670 pages, built on access that Geffen granted and then withdrew. Stephen Singular's is the earlier, shorter, faster book, and it arrived first.
GoldwynThe Producer as InstitutionSamuel Goldwyn arrived in America as Schmuel Gelbfisz, a penniless teenager from Warsaw who had walked much of the way across Europe. He became a glove salesman, then — almost by accident — a film producer, and then the only major figure of his generation to build a lasting business without ever owning a studio.
Making MoviesThe Budget Is a Creative DocumentSidney Lumet made 12 Angry Men, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon and Network. He also made them on time and on budget, for decades, which in that company is the more unusual achievement.
Indecent ExposureThe Forged Check That Took Down a StudioDavid Begelman, the head of Columbia Pictures, forged the actor Cliff Robertson's name on a check for ten thousand dollars.
Managing The Professional Service FirmThe Book About the Business You Are Actually InMost business books are written about companies that make things. This one is written about firms that sell judgement — where the assets go home at night, the product is a person's attention, and the thing being priced is trust.
Blowing the Bloody Doors OffAdvice from a Man Who Was Never Going to Make ItMaurice Micklewhite was a working-class boy from Rotherhithe with a Cockney accent at a time when English film acting required you not to have one. He spent years being told, in various polite formulations, that people like him did not do this.
The First Billion Is the HardestA Forecast That Can Now Be MarkedThis book was published in 2008, at the top of an oil market that was about to collapse, by a man who had just turned eighty and was staking his reputation and a substantial amount of his own money on a specific prediction about America's energy future.
PowerhouseHow Agents Took Over HollywoodIn 1975, five agents walked out of the William Morris Agency, pooled what money they had, and set up folding tables in a room with no furniture. One of their wives answered the phones.
A Prince Among StonesThe CFO Who Made the Rolling Stones RichIn 1968 Mick Jagger asked a merchant banker a question that should sound familiar to anyone who has ever been called into a creatively successful business: why are we broke?
Hit MenWhere the Money Actually WentPrince Rupert Loewenstein fixed one band's finances from the inside. Fredric Dannen went and found out what the industry those finances sat inside was actually doing.
Sleepless in HollywoodThe Producer Who Named the MechanismPeter Chernin, who used to run Fox, told Lynda Obst that the DVD business had represented about half of a studio's profit.
Adventures in the Screen TradeNobody Knows AnythingThree words from this book have done more damage to bad film-investment decisions than any due diligence process ever written.
An Empire of Their OwnThe Outsiders Who Built the DreamThe men who founded Hollywood were almost all immigrants or the children of immigrants, mostly Jewish, mostly from Eastern Europe, mostly poor, and mostly excluded from every established American industry.
The OperatorThe Biography Its Subject Tried to StopDavid Geffen agreed to cooperate with this book. Then he read where it was going, withdrew his authorisation, called it sensationalistic trash, and reportedly leaned on Random House to keep it off the shelves.