A history of the Condé Nast magazine empire, home of Vogue, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and more, focusing on its heyday from the 1980s through the 2000s.
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.
