This book is compulsively readable, partly because the author has been a major-league publisher for decades, with many famous authors, and partly because he can be surprising in his indiscretions. Zubin Mehta turns out to be “a jerk,” Bill O’Reilly is “honorable,” and Tina Brown, whose Vanity Fair Diaries he published, is a “cuddly barracuda.” Of course, Stephen Rubin also gave the world The Da Vinci Code, an astounding best-seller that should have been printed in purple, given its prose, and that netted Rubin himself a $1 million bonus the year it was published. He is candid about the foibles of fellow publishers but just as frank about his own mistakes, such as ordering Nan Talese not to bid on Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s Theater. On the other hand, he was happy to see her husband, Gay Talese, leave him for Knopf, “where his books never sold at the level they paid him.”
Rubin’s other passion is music, which he shared with his much-adored wife, Cynthia Robbins, who died in 2010, and much of the book’s charm rests in his early days as a writer of profiles of classical-music stars, for The New York Times. You may come to this book for the publishing gossip, but you also will be entertained by his thoughts on Pavarotti. “I saw him once without a shirt, and it was truly horrifying.” And this in the middle of an ode to the man!
