The book is a lively read. It is not a business book laden with numbers (which I would probably have enjoyed even more - but thats 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 couldnt have been a story told with hard numbers - because there really wasnt 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 isnt 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.