This is a solid book about a lifetime spent at the New York Times but Gelb does not deal with any of the cutting critiques of him in such books as "Fit To Print" (Lyle Stuart, 1988) by Joseph Goulden.
A few months ago, Jewish Press Editor Jason Maoz recommended about 20 books on the news media. I’ve since read almost all of them. Here is how I’d rank them by their current importance:
* Feeding Frenzy: How Attack Journalism Has Transformed American Politics (Free Press, 1991) by Larry Sabato
* Hard News (Random House, 2004) by Seth Mnookin
* Who Killed CBS? (Random House, 1988) by Peter Boyer (the best written of all these books)
* Hot Air: All Talk, All the Time (Times Books, 1996) by Howard Kurtz
* Media Circus: The Trouble With America’s Newspapers (Times Books, 1993) by Howard Kurtz
* Fit To Print (Lyle Stuart, 1988) by Joseph Goulden
* The Trust (Little Brown, 1999) by Susan Tifft and Alex Jones
* My Times (Grosset/Putnam, 1993) by John Corry
* Tick…Tick…Tick: The Long Life and Turbulent Times of 60 Minutes (HarperCollins, 2004) by David Blum
* It’s Alive! How America’s Oldest Newspaper Cheated Death and Why It Matters (Villard, 1996) by Steven Cuozzo
* Three Blind Mice: How the TV Networks Lost Their Way (Random House, 1991) by Ken Auletta
* A Good Life: Newspapering and Other Adventures (Simon & Schuster, 1995) by Ben Bradlee
* The Times of My Life And My Life With the Times (Random House, 1999) by Max Frankel
* The Powers That Be (Knopf, 1979) by David Halberstam
* The Paper: The Life and Death of the New York Herald Tribune (Alfred A. Knopf, 1986) by Richard Kluger
* The House That Roone Built: The Inside Story of ABC News (Little Brown, 1994) by Marc Gunther
* Theirs Was the Kingdom: Lila and Dewitt Wallace and the Story of the Reader’s Digest (W.W. Norton, 1993) by John Heidenry
* Read All About It! The Collected Adventures of a Maverick Reporter (Summit Books, 1982) by Sidney Zion
* The Great American Newspaper: The Rise and Fall of the Village Voice (Scribner, 1978) by Kevin McAuliffe
