The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch

By Michael Wolff

Broadway

446 pages, $29.95

Michael Wolff’s prose style is sui generis. Unique. Which we know. Sort of. His prose is so hard-edged he uses Fuck You as an adjective. He breaks every rule, and with gusto. With sentences that consist of one-word exclamations. And longer, complex sentences—studded with dashes—which run on and on and never seem to end. Not now. Not ever. It shouldn’t work, but it does . . . well, often it does. Except when it doesn’t.

In choosing to write a biography of Rupert Murdoch—a sort of biography, anyway—Wolff has found his subject. Murdoch not only chose to sit for interviews, but arranged for the author to interview family members and business associates, creating a perfect storm of conditions for a wildly idiosyncratic, bizarrely organized (disorganized might be the better word), but never less than fascinating portrait of the press baron and his family. At the same time, Wolff crosscuts this biographical project with a blow-by-blow narrative of the deal that won Murdoch and his News Corporation control of The Wall Street Journal.

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