We've been asked for book recommendations before and, as a remedial media reader, I'm not particularly equipped to make them. So we sent mb News Editor David Hirschman to track down a few media people who are, some of whom are media book authors themselves, and ask them one question: What's the most useful book on media you've read and why? (Alright, technically that's two questions, but you get the point.) We allowed them to define "useful" however they wanted and, in some cases, "book" as well. (Consistency, hobgoblins, etc.)

And, oh yeah:The Columnist and Turn of the Century—excellent books.

Elizabeth Spiers
editor in chief, mediabistro

Eric Alterman
Media Columnist, The Nation, Author, What Liberal Media?
My favorite book on journalism, as relevant as any written recently, is Honore de Balzac's Lost Illusions. It is frightening how much doesn't change. My favorite book on politics came out only recently and that's volume III of Robert Caro's Lyndon Johnson biography, Master of the Senate. One thing journalists can learn in reading Caro—or Balzac for that matter—is that almost everything that is reported at the time turns out to be bullshit when the truth is finally known. So much of what we call "news" is a fiction we tell ourselves for comfort. That's what history teaches anyway, but people keep falling for it because they need the illusion to keep going. After those, my favorite book on journalism is my boss Victor Navasky's terrific new memoir, A Matter of Opinion.

Kurt Andersen
Host, WNYC's Studio 360, Author, Turn of the Century
Timothy Crouse's Boys on the Bus. The book came out more or less simultaneously with Hunter Thompson's book about the 1972 presidential campaign. And while Thompson's account is, of course, entertaining and true, Crouse's careful, clear-eyed, irreverent, anecdotally rich, narratively coherent deconstruction of how the press actually covers campaigns was the first great book of its kind. With Joe McGinnis' Selling of the President, 1968, which came out not long before, The Boys on the Bus essentially invented a generational take and genre, and all subsequent media-on-media and politics-as-marketing stories, which now appear every four years in every media outlet, derive from those books' memes.

David Carr
Media Reporter, The New York Times
Oddly enough, I did a piece a while ago about Truman Capote that required me to buy a copy of In Cold Blood. I got a vintage copy and browsed it for the story and when I went on vacation it was in my briefcase, along with some mid-summer New Yorkers. In Cold Blood popped out, I just started browsing and found myself riveted. He cheats, obviously, much more so than Woodward ever did, in terms of getting inside people's heads and thoughts, but does it in a way that seems very truthful. It remains a surprisingly dynamic classic of the genre.

And I also recently read The United States of Wal-mart, which goes a long way toward explaining how the giant retailer is editing culture and consumption. the kid who wrote it is profane and very skilled. we are what we buy, for sure. I reviewed it for the New York Times Book Review, but only after I read it.

And last, also sadly work-related, is Canaan's Tongue, a novel about a revivalist-slash-slave trader on the cusp of the Civil War. Admittedly, I rode on a raft built by the author on the Mississippi as part of the book tour, but I actually read the book after I finished the story. It is a showy, roccocco work that totally earns its ambitions. John Wray, who wrote the book and built the raft, is ambitious and hard working, both on the river and at the desk—a new kind of Southern gothic that is scary in its excellence.

Simon Dumenco
Columnist, Advertising Age
I'm going to recommend two books that I worked on, but didn't write—not out of self-interest (I have absolutely no economic participation in the sales of either book), but simply because they're among the most provocative media books I've ever read. The first is Seth Mnookin's Hard News: Twenty-one Brutal Months at The New York Times and How They Changed the American Media. I did an informal edit on the book (Seth is a friend of mine and thanked me in acknowledgements), so obviously I'm biased—but you should know that the book was widely acclaimed by lots of people who aren't me. And The London Independent named it one of the Top 50 books ever written on the media. To tell you the truth, when I first started reading it, I was sort of bored (sorry, Seth), mainly because I thought I had little interest in the inner workings of the Times. But then, as I got into it, I quickly became enthralled. Hard News helped me to really understand, for the first time, just how contorted—and politicized and bureaucratized and arbitrary—decisions can be at the Times, which of course has an unparalleled role in shaping "the first draft of history." Reading Seth's book basically changed my whole relationship, as a reader, with the Times.

The second book I'll recommend is Michael Wolff's Autumn of the Moguls: My Misadventures With the Titans, Poseurs, and Money Guys Who Mastered and Messed Up Big Media. Full disclosure: I lured Michael Wolff to New York magazine to be its media columnist way back in 1998, and this book—which I formally edited—is an outgrowth of that column. (Michael, who is also a friend of mine, is now a columnist at Vanity Fair.) It's a sprawling, reckless, self-indulgent, hilarious screed of a book, which is to say that it's way more entertaining—and infinitely more honest and illuminating—than all the other more polite efforts to tell the story of Big Media out there. In fact, the book was frequently panned or dismissed by people who were either slammed in the book or had rather obvious connections to people who were slammed in the book. But that's Michael: He's not afraid to risk it all, no matter what the consequences. The man has no sacred cows (or sheep or rats). Anyway, it's totally fun to read regardless of whether you hate Michael or love him—or both.

James Fallows
National Correspondent, The Atlantic Monthly
My favorites are a policy book, a biography, two novels, and two works of novelistic nonfiction. In order they are: The Creation of the Media, by Paul Starr, which tell us how the press got where it is now. Walter Lippman and the American Century, by Ronald Steel, a high-road version of how things used to be. Scoop, by Evelyn Waugh, and Floater, by Calvin Trillin; two lower-road accounts of the past that is still with us. And The Boys on the Bus, by Timothy Crouse, and What It Takes, by Richard Ben Cramer, which describe the creation of the modern media-political age.

Jon Fine
Media Columnist, Business Week
Put another vote down for Timothy Crouse's The Boys on the Bus, in which he covered the press covering the '72 Presidential campaign. It's probably more famous for its color than anything else. (To name just two: the anecdote about the stewardess on one campaign plane who had a thing for secret service men and "entertained" quite a few of them; the one about the Boston Globe editor who handed Hunter S. Thompson a lit joint on a campaign bus in '68 while, correctly, predicting the rest of the press would not realize what they were doing.) But it's also full of lovely, effortlessly executed journalistic pirouettes. At one point he off-handedly deconstructs the complex trajectory of one leaked scoop to R.W. Apple to disprove Apple's claim of how he got it—and, more importantly, makes inside-baseball crap readable. Also great for its evocation of Presidential campaigns in a pre-saturation coverage era, as well as sharp profiles of the political journalists—Apple, David Broder, Jack Germond, Bob Novak—that still shape the collective opinion of the commentariat.

Jon Friedman
Media Columnist, Marketwatch
David Halberstam's classic The Powers That Be edges out All the President's Men and The Kingdom and the Power as the most useful book about the media that I've ever read. Halberstam has written several memorable books, but this one is truly special.

Not only does Halberstam execute the difficult feat of weaving four disparate sagas—CBS, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and Time magazine—but he does so in a riveting manner. He brilliantly tells the story of these powerful organizations and fully discusses their weaknesses and foibles. As usual, Halberstam's rare gift for unearthing revealing anecdotes is well on display, too. Nobody gets better anecdotes than Halberstam. Hell yes, I'm jealous.

The book details the changes in the media throughout the post-World War II period, tracing the rise and fall of Richard Nixon. Sure, it could be argued that a book about history that concludes in the 1970s may seem out of date by now in this digital, blog-happy age of communications.

Not by a long shot. It would be like arguing that "Citizen Kane" is outdated by movie-making technology is so advanced these days. I've urged a lot of young journalists to read this book if they want to understand how to cover the media beat well and understand why the world is the way it is today.

Nick Gillespie
Editor in Chief, Reason
Build a bonfire on the beach with all those hand-wringing tomes about journalism's sick, sad decline that have washed ashore these past few years like so much medical waste on Coney Island. To learn all you ever need to know about credibility, credulity, and the ability to hold (and alienate) an audience, turn to The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, the 1838 "true-life" tale of mutiny, cannibalism, and much more by the first gonzo journalist, Edgar Allan Poe. (Long before Hunter Thompson tromped through the Kentucky Derby, Poe was calling out his colleagues in print and drunkenly stumbling through the gutters of America, wearing his clothes inside-out and picking fights with imaginary people over the size of their mustaches.) Like Judy Miller's tales of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, Pym is a series of increasingly unbelievable missives presented as truth with a capital T. The novel's sardonically twisted ending explodes in your face like a cartoon cigar and no journalist who reads it will ever be suckered by a source—or rhetorical flourishes—again.

Arianna Huffington
Founder, The Huffington Post
Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin is novelist Larry Beinhart's first foray into non-fiction. It's about all the things we could know—because they've been published—but somehow don't know, because they've been lost in the fog. Here's Beinhart's take on the obsolete left-right way of looking at things: "The split in attitudes about the media is not split between right and left, but between the faith-based and reality-based communities. When the right attacks the liberal media, what it is really attacking is objective media, with fact-checking." And a few notes on what the Bush administration might have picked up in a little pre-war research, had it bothered: "The administration said they were going to base the occupation of Iraq on the successful occupation of Germany after World War II. Why didn't anyone notice that that occupation began with over a million US troops. Or that's it's sixty years later and we're still there." Fog Facts explores the world of facts that are reported but lost in the static and haze of our 500-channel universe.

Walter Isaacson
President and CEO, The Aspen Institute
Evelyn Waugh's Scoop, because it reminds us that we occasionally must refrain from taking ourselves too seriously.

Jim Kelly
Managing Editor, Time
Floater, by Calvin Trillin. A quarter-century after its publication, Floater remains the funniest dissection of what it's like to work at a weekly magazine. A "floater" is a jack-of-all-trades writer who floats from section to section, writing science one week and politics the next, and Trillin has written a classic comic novel that covers everything from how to avoid writing about religion (put "alleged" in front of every Biblical event, such as the "alleged Nativity") to absurd Washington scandals (tame by Monica Lewinsky standards, but still pretty absurd). For my money (and the book is easily bought second-hand on Amazon), Floater is Scoop without the English accent.

Keith Kelly
Media Reporter, The New York Post
I don't think it sold like a rocket, but I thought Hard News, Seth Mnookin's book on all the problems at the New York Times involving Jayson Blair scandal and the eventual ouster of executive Howell Raines, was terrific. He took a story that had been covered to death, gave it a new perspective and unearthed lots of new material.

And in what I consider a unique twist, in the paperback version, he also printed a long line of corrections. Now what author has the integrity to do that?

Seth Mnookin
Contributing Editor, Vanity Fair, Author, Hard News
There are two books that are the most "useful" books I've ever read, because they convinced me journalism could be exciting and in doing so shaped my entire professional life: Woodward and Bernstein's All the President's Men and Hunter Thompson's The Great Shark Hunt. I picked them both up around the same time—my early teens—and the mere act of reading them was so vertiginously thrilling I was convinced that doing journalism had to be just as much fun. Most books about journalism are migraine-inducingly dull. But Woodward and Bernstein wrote a real-life detective novel; Thompson wove hilarious, personal tales in to some of the most prescient social and political reportage ever produced. Thank god I picked these up when I did.

Victor Navasky
Publisher and Editorial Director, The Nation
Anyone interested in how to do journalism ought to check out The New New Journalism: Conversations With America's Best Nonfiction Writers on Their Craft by Robert Boynton. Not because they are The Best, whatever that means (although Calvin Trillin, Gay Talese, William Finnegan, Susan Orleans, William Langeweische and the rest of his nineteen-member crew are all worth checking out), and not because he asks inspired or original questions. To the contrary, he systematically asks them all more or less the same (sometimes boring) questions about their routines, their pen colors, their note-taking (and/or taping‚ techniques and such). But by the time you've read these worthies' answers, you have a solid basis for comparison and you know that their collective secret is that they have no secret. This, strangely, turns out to be useful, and even reassuring, information.

Jim Nelson
Editor in Chief, GQ
When I think of media issues, I think of a couple of books that, together, form two poles of journalistic reason. One is Janet Malcolm's A-bomb of a book, The Journalist and the Murderer. What editor or writer could sleep after digesting her charge that he practices a "morally indefensible" trade, that he plays tricks to win the confidence of subjects he will soon betray? Yet: I was simultaneously devastated and inspired by the book, and rocked by its slanderous truths. You could say that it suffers from a brand of moralism. And looking back, those opening sentences do have a whiff of the Bartlett's Quotations about them, as if they were being chiseled into our brains by some mixture of guilt and overstatement. But what I liked most about that book was its rigor and its sheer intellectual honesty, because those are the qualities I'd most like to see more of in magazine pieces. On the opposite pole, but equally candid and equally bold, is an essay in Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem, which my friend David Rakoff recently sent me (he rereads it every time he sits down to write), called "On Keeping a Notebook." Didion doesn't shrink from the subjective nature of first-person writing: "I tell what some would call lies," she says, even though she aims to be truthful. "'That's simply not true,' the members of my family frequently tell me when they come up against my memory of a shared event." (Think of the Jung family and how they would despise her!) And then she adds this great line: "How it felt to me: that is getting closer to the truth about a notebook." I love that "getting closer to the truth." Either way you slice it, that's what you want.

Sara Nelson
Editor in Chief, Publisher's Weekly
While it didn't generate a lot of sales, Seth Mnookin's Hard News, about the Howell Raines era at The New York Times, is a favorite of mine. People think it's all about the disgraced journalist Jayson Blair—and there's plenty of that—but the overall portrait Mnookin (full disclosure: we once worked together) paints of the Times hierarchy and politics is fascinating, and far more accessible than any of the brass there might want it to be.

Bill Powers
Media Columnist, The National Journal
I go back all the time to Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. By the end of his life, McLuhan was a ridiculous figure—the media philosopher as media whore. For a lot of people, the cartoonish McLuhan who appeared on "Laugh-In" overshadows the work that made him famous in the first place. But the books are fantastically wise and original. The beauty of McLuhan is the way he connected the Western literary tradition to the technologies that were transforming our lives. He loved books and stories, and Understanding Media is all about using the great stories of our culture—he cites everyone from Plato to Al Capp—to help us make sense of the media. His central notion that the media are extensions of our bodies, which he meant literally, feels truer than ever today.

Steven Rattner
Managing Principal, Quadrangle Group, LLC
The Kingdom and the Power. Still the best book ever about The New York Times or any other newspaper. I was slaving away on my college paper when a friend gave it to me as a birthday present. I was captivated and by the end, awed by the Times. That respect has remained strong, even after almost nine years as a Times staffer and another 23 years as a mere reader. Notwithstanding the inevitable gaps, it is an extraordinary institution and we should all be grateful to have it.

Jack Shafer
Media Critic, Slate
I never travel far without a copy of W. Russell Neuman's The Future of the Mass Audience in hand. Published in 1991, well before the web arrived, it accurately predicted that evolving media technology would fragment the mass audience before economics and entrepreneurs conspired to reaggregate it. It was Neuman who first alerted me to the fact that the digitization of media meant that for the first time all media would speak a common language and that the cartels and monopolies dominating radio, TV, newspapers, motion pictures, recordings, etc. would finally be forced to compete with one another.

Michael Wolff
Contributing Editor, Vanity Fair, Author, Autumn of the Moguls
Daniel J. Boorstin's The Image: A Guide to Pseudo Events in America, because it's one of the few books about the media as self-promotion machine which is not in itself an act of self-promotion; Randall Rothenberg's Where the Suckers Moon, because it's one of the few media books about what the media is about, which is advertising; David Ogilvy's Confessions of an Advertising Man, because it may be the only other readable book about what the media business is really about; and Michael Frayn's Toward the End of Morning, which is about working on the obit desk in the final era of Fleet Street, because I am reading it now on my summer vacation.

Fareed Zakaria
Editor, Newsweek International
The best book on the media was written 83 years ago by Walter Lippmann, then a thirty-two year old journalist who had already published three books and helped President Woodrow Wilson draft his "Fourteen Points" program. Titled Public Opinion, the book describes the basic problem of modern democracy. Public policies are now decided, he explained, by public opinion. But the public is informed about an increasingly complex world only through the reporting, images, and stories that the media brings to it. The media is "like the beam of a searchlight that moves restlessly about, bringing one episode and then the other out of darkness into vision." The problem for Lippmann was that the media almost by definition could not do its job well, focusing on the wrong issues or distorting the right ones. To put it in our times, on the basis on media coverage one would assume that Michael Jackson's trial was the great, seismic event of 2005. China's rise, India's growth, America's failing schools, Darfur, all these pale in comparison. Lippmann was right. This isn't just a problem for the media. It's a problem for our democracy. Sorry to be a downer. But it is well written.

David Zinczenko
Editor in Chief, Men's Health
The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding, by Al Ries and Laura Ries. This book is about the critical principles associated with building a powerful brand identity. A lot of magazines get off-message, or flail about trying to define themselves; that's particularly true for men's magazines. It's because the brand wasn't strong enough to begin with, and the editors didn't do a great job of understanding and developing those vital and unique qualities that create that compelling promise. Men's Health now has 33 editions in 41 countries, and each one of them is on brand, every single issue. That's been the secret of our success.