Lively if elegiac ... When it comes to hirings and firings and office intrigues, the technical word for this book is juicy. He has all the details he can fit ... Weaker on questions of the company’s aesthetics and editorial approaches.
A sober affair—an unflustered, chronological account of half a century’s comings-and-goings—but has the merit of relative objectivity ... Empire of the Elite is a lucid introduction to this rarefied milieu and the people who inhabited it.
Very enjoyable ... Where once the publishing house was the life of the party, it is now a barely animated corpse, felled by the 2008 financial crash, the rise of the internet and a shift in public mood that no longer finds Condé Nast’s veneration of wealth quite so appealing.
Not a bad book by any means, and is quite gossipy in parts ... Grynbaum’s book details the rivalry between the likes of Carter, Wintour and the wonderful Tina Brown, but for some reason it only tells half the story ... If you want to find out what the company was like pre-Covid, then half the story is in this book.
Brisk and engaging ... It’s at once a celebration and a valedictory, witty without veering into (excessive) snark. The book reads as though Grynbaum, a media reporter for The New York Times, had fun writing it ... Filled with well-reported gossip and dish.
Although Grynbaum explores the excess and elitism that characterized Condé Nast’s golden years, he gives little consideration to the omissions in coverage the company’s culture inevitably created. The book is almost wholly unburdened by racial analysis, as if Condé Nast’s near-monolithic whiteness were incidental to its editorial decisions and imagined audiences. Still, the author’s engaging writing style and deep knowledge of Condé Nast history will appeal to readers interested in long-form journalism and the culture industry.
Grynbaum digs into the inner workings of Condé Nast in exquisite detail, tracing the career of editor Tina Brown, who helmed both Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, and shedding light on the 'accusations of racial insensitivity' at Bon Appétit in 2020. Grynbaum makes clear that at its height, the culture of Condé Nast was one of exclusionary wealth, where 'budgets were for the unimaginative.' It’s a definitive account of a media titan.
