Books: Burn Rate

Why is this boardroom tell-all generating more buzz than a Yahoo IPO? Surely everybody already suspects that the Internet bull market is a shell game. But who would have guessed that one of the minor players, having failed to find money dumb enough to make him rich, would get his payback with so deft a pen? Nobody comes off clean in this vengeful little book, not the venomous heirs of Robert Maxwell nor the philistine publishers of Windows magazine nor the executives at Time Inc. (where the author worked briefly as a consultant). “I’m a writer,” Wolff tells his business partner at the book’s emotional turning point. “If this company goes down, I will…write. Perhaps about you.”

–By Philip Elmer-DeWitt