EDITOR’S NOTE: Click here to read an excerpt from Roger Ailes: Off Camera [Penguin/Sentinel, $26.95].
1. Everyone’s talking about this book–it was excerpted in Vanity Fair; The New York Times brutally panned the book (here’s our story about the pan); and Gawker got in on the action.
2. How could you not? Even if Roger Ailes hadn’t built the most successful cable news network (by a lot), his life and times would be fascinating, from the Mike Douglas Show to CNBC, for both his many fans and detractors.
3. The book’s single best example of Mr. Ailes’s deftness and managerial brio–in which Mr. Chafets details how Mr. Ailes artfully maneuvered Glenn Beck off of Fox–had somehow not been mentioned elsewhere.
4. As the founding editor of the Jerusalem Report, Mr. Chafets knows the worst thing you can call someone is a “freyer” (sucker). When Penguin asked for $2 a word, we countered with a Jamba Juice spit take. Let’s just say it ended up friendlier than that.