Cover design by Lawrence Ratzkin
HarperCollins, 1995
Along a palmy stretch of Wilshire Boulevard, a handful of powerful talent agencies are locked in combat over the stars who drive the global entertainment industry. But the talent wars aren't new; they started a century ago, when a young immigrant named William Morris opened a vaudeville-booking office on 14th Street in New York. The Agency is the story of all that followed: a multigenerational saga of loyalty and betrayal.
Mae West, Frank Sinatra, Marilyn Monroe, Milton Berle, Steve McQueen—the Morris Agency sold talent to anyone in the market for it, from the Hollywood moguls to the mobsters who ran Vegas to the Madison Avenue admen who controlled television. While the clients took the spotlight, the Agency operated behind the scenes, supplying the grease that made show business run. But when its leader brutally sacrificed his best friend—the man who'd brought Barry Diller and Michael Ovitz out of the mailroom—the Agency gave birth to its own nemesis: Ovitz's CAA. As the Morris Agency made and lost such stars as Mel Gibson, Julia Roberts, Kevin Costner, and Tom Hanks, Ovitz's power grew inexorably as Morris's waned.
From 14th Street to Wilshire Boulevard, one axiom has never changed: Control the talent and you control the business. Which is why, as they say in Hollywood, the story of William Morris is the story of show business itself.
Viking, 1989
Apple was the archetype of the New Age in American business, a company started in a garage by two California whiz kids who took as their emblem the "perfect fruit," the symbol of knowledge since the Garden of Eden. Yet it soon evolved into a Fortune 500 corporation that would drive out its founders and replace them with a pin-striped, East Coast marketing executive. Secret meetings, high-level power struggles, executive paranoia, corporate intrigue—all these were quite the opposite of the "small is beautiful" extrepreneurial innocence that characterized the early years of the company that invented personal computing.
Apple co-founder Steve Jobs hand-picked John Sculley, the president of Pepsi-Cola, to lead Apple into the future, only to find himself pushed out of the chain of command, and ultimately out of Apple itself. But this is more than a story of corporate upheaval; it's another chapter in the myth of the West, with its conflict between the lure of gold and the dream of a golden land, between financial reward and personal fulfillment, between greed and idealism. It is the story of a visionary's fall—a tale that reverberates with the tension between corporate power and cultural revolution.
A national bestseller. Selected as one of the year's ten best by Business Week.
Also published in Japan by The Simul Press; in the Netherlands as De Ontgroening van Apple by Veen/uitgevers; and in the U.K. by Century Hutchinson/Business Books.
Harper & Row, 1984
In a cramped laboratory tucked away in the Berkeley engineering school, a small team of scientists is attempting to teach a computer named Kim to think—not just to shuffle data, but to learn, reason, remember, understand English, make associations, and exhibit that curious quality we call "common sense." But thinking remains an enigma: How do we remember things? How do we forget? How does language work? And how do you translate all of it—learning, understanding, consciousness itself—into the binary code of computers?
Philosophers claim the task is impossible. Others declare it morally suspect. No one knows what impact it will have on society. And deep in the background lies the shadow of the Pentagon, which is paying for the research and has plans for what to do with it, from G.I. robots to animated battle stations. Into the Heart of the Mind is a story that raises provocative questions about the limits of technology and the shape of the future.
A national bestseller.
Also published in France as L'Intelligence Artificielle by Payot; in Japan by The Simul Press; in the Netherlands as De Leerlingen van Frankenstein by Veen/uitgevers; in the U.K. by Century Hutchinson; and in West Germany as In Herz des Verstandes by Roitman Verlag.
Photographs by George Bennett
Doubleday/Dolphin, 1980
This is a book about styles of masculinity—about power and discipline, sex and violence, and the roles they play in the lives of American men today. It can be thought of as a personal and idiosyncratic survey, using a very small and intentionally atypical sample, that was designed to produce not statistical data but individual answers to the question of what it means to be a man. And just as none of these men are intended to be representative, nor are they intended to be heroes. We didn't go looking for heroes, because this book isn't about "real men," the mythical ideal; it's about real men. Here are seven of them.
Edited by Dave Marsh and John Swenson
Random House/Rolling Stone Press, 1983
Edited by Dave Marsh and John Swenson
Random House/Rolling Stone Press, 1979
Edited by Marianne Partridge
Doubleday/Dolphin/Rolling Stone Press, 1979
