Book reviews: ‘Bonfire of the Murdochs’ and ‘The Typewriter and the Guillotine’

‘Bonfire of the Murdochs: How the Epic Fight to Control the Last Great Media Dynasty Broke a Family—and the World’ by Gabriel Sherman

Not merely a great read, Gabriel Sherman’s brief new history of the Murdoch family is also “a brilliant guide to how not to love your children,” said Matthew Lynn in The Washington Post. At the heart of Sherman’s story, of course, stands Rupert Murdoch, who inherited an Australian newspaper at age 21 and built from it a global media empire that, particularly by way of Fox News, has remade the U.S. news landscape and, in Sherman’s view, fueled the rise of Donald Trump. In recent decades, Murdoch, now 94, has subjected his oldest adult children to withering takedowns and has also pitted them against one another. But while the veteran journalist has done “a magnificent job” of getting inside the family feud, “there is a flaw at the narrative’s heart,” because he ignores business logic by presenting the children who hoped to abandon Fox’s conservative tilt as the two who deserved to win.

Whether you’re rooting for Liz, Lachlan, or James among Rupert’s potential heirs, “it’s a wonder all three are not in a psych ward,” said Tina Brown in The Observer (U.K.). “The great benefit of Bonfire of the Murdochs is its brevity,” because the distillation brings out Rupert’s repeated ruthlessness in matters of both business and family. Now on his fifth marriage, he has dumped four wives in all, including one, Jerry Hall, via a terse email. Meanwhile, he forced or lured Liz, Lachlan, and James into joining the family business, only to betray each of them. He had James take the fall for the 2011 phone-hacking scandal at the U.K. tabloid News of the World, then tasked Liz with firing her brother. And even Lachlan, who shares his father’s paleo-conservative worldview and was therefore granted control of Fox News, ultimately had to accept that much of the Murdoch empire had been sold out from under him when Rupert passed off 20th Century Fox to Disney for $71 billion in 2019.

There’s “something almost novelistic” in the trajectory of the Murdoch tale, said Andrew O’Hagan in The New Yorker. Rupert spent seven decades building his empire, then tore apart his family to prevent any of them from inheriting it intact, leaving his six children with payoffs of $1.1 billion each and his favored son atop Fox Corp. and News Corp. Maybe that end is fitting, because Lachlan carries on “his father’s core business insight: that great fortunes can be made from audiences who prefer their reality falsified.” Maybe Lachlan’s assumption of the throne also makes matters worse. Rupert’s British tabloids, though trashy, have at least been funny. Lachlan’s Fox News is “something darker: a purveyor of apocalyptic doom-mongering where America is a place of perpetual rape, murder, conspiracy, and terror.”

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‘The Typewriter and the Guillotine: An American Journalist, a German Serial Killer, and Paris on the Eve of WWII’ by Mark Braude

After so many portraits of the Lost Generation that focus on men, “what a relief to come upon a different viewpoint,” said Glynnis MacNicol in The New York Times. In Janet Flanner, author Mark Braude has found an “endlessly compelling subject.” Born in Indianapolis in 1892, Flanner was a writer who befriended many of the biggest names in New York City’s literary circles before crossing the Atlantic and doing the same in Paris. For 50 years, beginning in 1925, she wrote most of the “Letter From Paris” dispatches that appeared in The New Yorker, starting with wry reports that filled readers in on the exploits of pals such as Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and Josephine Baker. And while “it’s eye-opening to realize how much of our collective idea of 1920s Paris comes from Flanner,” this talented free spirit was just getting started.

Flanner’s story is unfortunately regularly interrupted by short passages about a second figure, said Chris Hewitt in The Minnesota Star Tribune. Eugen Weidmann might be “the dullest and most hapless serial killer ever,” yet Braude has decided to revisit the German wanderer’s murders, trial, and 1939 execution by French authorities because the French arguably poured their anxiety about imminent war into the drama. The Weidmann story wasn’t any kind of career peak for Flanner, said Michael O’Donnell in The Wall Street Journal. “Nor was the war.” She had been glib at times about a potential invasion and in late 1939 fled Europe, returning only after Paris’ 1944 liberation. Still, she’d been savvy enough in 1936 to write a profile of Adolf Hitler meant to be alarming, and in the postwar years she redeemed herself with her coverage of the Nazi death camps and the Nuremberg trials.

While little connects Weidmann to Flanner, said Brad Pearce in the New York Post, Braude’s pairing of the stories “brings 1930s Paris to life for modern readers.” It also throws a spotlight on the largely forgotten Flanner, who “deserves to be celebrated.” She was a master of “understated but incisive irony” and her style was “so influential that, without knowing it, many now write like her or at least try to.”