Tina and Harry Come to America: Tina Brown, Harry Evans, and the Uses of Power (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The rise and downward slide of magazine editor Tina Brown (Vanity Fair, New Yorker, Talk) and husband, Harry Evans (former editor of the London Sunday Times and, later, president of Random House), goes under the microscope in Tina and Harry Come to America: Tina Brown, Harry Evans and the Uses of Power, which has been causing a stir in New York media circles, for whom stories of the media pair have long been catnip. For many readers, the real news in the book will be the account of the couple's earlier years in England rather than the familiar ground of their New York power struggles in the last decade. Vanity Fair contributing editor Judy Bachrach's book is well researched, but her determination to make the couple's story emblematic of contemporary media culture introduces a degree of editorializing.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Product Description

In a story that will reverberate throughout the media world, Judy Bachrach traces the course of two careers and one romance -- all driven by soaring ambition. With the right amount of energy, money, and desire, Tina Brown and Harry Evans knew how to handle virtually everything that came their way. Once they arrived from England, they felt destined to climb to the heights of the American media. The couple epitomized within elite corporate as well as social circles what might be called parvenu royalty, which covered both of them with the dazzling glaze of power, position, and fame. Underneath, of course, they were quite different: nature's Americans, one might say, hungry, passionate, forever reinventing themselves.

Tina put her stamp on Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and Talk magazine. Harry ran Random House. Over the years, they artfully crafted and recrafted the faces they showed the world, confident they were a match for anybody...especially for each other. They were constantly in the public eye, throwing parties, accepting the adulation of their peers -- all the time making sure that no one really knew anything about them. But what happens to the perfect married couple -- wealthy, attractive, running twin empires, the darlings of the media, the envy of their bitter rivals -- when their world starts to fall apart and the enchantment fades? This rich, fast-paced story of Tina Brown and Harry Evans is not only a brilliant account of two media stars, but also a tale of how this British couple molded and shaped every aspect of the American publishing world -- until it inevitably turned on them. Written with laser-sharp wit and a perceptive eye for revealing detail, Tina and Harry Come to America reads like a bestselling novel and is, at times, uncanny in its resemblance to William Thackeray's Vanity Fair -- a riveting, cautionary tale of power and the media.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Free Press (July 31, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684837633
• ISBN-13: 978-0684837635
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.5 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #426,348 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Curiously uninteresting and wandering, and badly edited, August 6, 2001

By	David Ljunggren (Ottawa, Ontario Canada) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I don't know quite how the author has managed it, but she has produced a fairly dull book on what look to be two very interesting characters. After absorbing the pre-publication hype I was convinced this would be a rollicking no-holds barred examination of the depths Tina Brown and Harry Evans had sunk to during their years in America. It strikes me that this was the pitch the author made to the publisher but it doesn't work, for a number of reasons. As you get deeper into the book the author makes clear that whatever their personal foibles, these were in fact two very gifted people. Yes, their habits and methods were not to everyone's liking, but jeepers! Are we supposed to be surprised that a highly-strung editor of two top magazines sometimes wasn't very nice to people? This is New York, for heaven's sake. The book is surprisingly balanced in its assessment of Tina Brown and yet the author, perhaps feeling a little guilty that the portrayal isn't sharp or controversial enough, resorts to some pretty insulting copy. Do we really want to know that Tina once put on make-up badly or once turned up to a meeting with unshaven legs? Come off it. This is part of the overall problem with this work, which has clearly been put together in a hurry. It certainly needed a better editor. Within a few pages at the start at least two anecdotes are repeated verbatim and the concluding section is a real mess, just a collection of thoughts thrown down on the paper. So reader beware -- although in places this is a very interesting book, it's not the one the publicists would have you believe it to be.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars This books leaves many questions unanswered, August 7, 2001

By	Johnny Korlo "jkorlo" (Canada) - See all my reviews

I started this book with the conviction that I would finally learn what had made Tina Brown such a feared and respected editor. Unfortunately, when I finished it I was somewhat disappointed. Judy Bachrach certainly does a good job of finding disaffected former employees who dish out all sorts of dirt on Tina Brown and detail working practices and habits which seem to have caused her underlings some serious grief. But what I did not really learn was what exactly why she was brought across from London to edit first Vanity Fair and then the New Yorker. She was clearly not a charlatan, she clearly had talents, but the use to which she put them is obscured by the dirt and nastiness regularly dumped all over Brown by other people quoted in this book. As a reader of the New Yorker for the last 15 years I can say that she did indeed change it, in many ways for the better. I still have some of my old pre-Brown copies of the magazine and while they do contain the occasional excellent articles, there are also many long, long screeds about fruitflies and tomatoes and some obscure aspect of baseball which were allowed to ramble on and on. Whatever faults she may have had, Tina Brown at least turned the magazine into something I wanted to read and actually looked forward to every week. She did make mistakes (as the book makes clear) and I agree with critics who say the Diana issue was extremely ill-judged, but the magazine now is in many ways a sorry shadow of what it once was. It saddens me to say that I look forward to Harper's and Atlantic Monthly with more anticipation than I do the New Yorker. The one area where the magazine has really collapsed is the fiction section, where whoever is in charge seems to have completely given up. Almost every week it's the same thing, exceedingly well-known names writing variations on the same themes, be it Alice Munro or William Trevor or whoever else it might be. What happened to the magazine's fine old tradition of unearthing new authors? I note that Zadie Smith is now going to be writing a story for the magazine, which is a good thing, but it would have been more impressive had the magazine published her before the success of "White Teeth". Yes, there has been the odd New Fiction issue with a few new authors, but I can think of no area where the New Yorker has collapsed so miserably as in fiction. So do read Bachrach's book if you have an interest in Tina Brown and Harry Evans but don't expect an answer to all your questions.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Bitchy but amusing, November 7, 2001

By A Customer

WHAT did Tina Brown do to Judy Bachrach? That's really the question you keep asking yourself while reading this bitchy if amusing book. Not that Ms Brown and Mr Evans don't deserve quite a bit of the stick they get here, but it is so... unrelenting. Judy Bachrach now works for Tina Brown's successor at Vanity Fair, and she applies to Tina and Harry the gossipy techniques which made VF's success. She should have applied fuller disclosure to her motives.

That being said, most details here are probably accurate. Thebook is not published in the UK for fear of libel suits. Not very sportsmanlike of Tina and Harry.