Toby Young's Top Book Recommendations
Want to know what books Toby Young recommends on their reading list? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of Toby Young's favorite book recommendations of all time.
As he describes his efforts to control his company's burn rate—the amount of money the company consumes in excess of its income—Wolff offers a no-holds-barred portrait of unaccountable successes and major disasters,... more
Recommended by Toby Young, and 1 others. Toby YoungOf all the journalists I met in New York when I was working at Vanity Fair, the one who came closest to living up to my ideal – fearless, funny, provocative, profound – was Michael Wolff. When I met him in 1998 he was writing a weekly media column for New York magazine and it was so good, such a must-read, that he was the toast of the city. I introduced myself via email after reading Burn Rate... (Source)
Recommended by Toby Young, and 1 others. Toby YoungAs a journalist who rarely leaves my desk, I don’t get an opportunity to do much reportage – but I get a vicarious thrill from reading it. Some of my favourite journalism books are examples of sustained reporting about a single subject – The Studio by John Gregory Dunne, for instance, and American Ground by William Langewiesche – but I don’t think I’ve enjoyed a book of reportage more than Black... (Source)
"On the night of January 4, 1970, Maestro and Mrs. Leonard Bernstein threw a bash in their thirteen-room park Avenue pad to raise money for the Black Panthers Defense Fund. New York society will probably never play Lady Bountiful in quite the same way again, because among the Beautiful People present was Tom Wolfe, pop sociologist and parajournalist supreme."--Book World less
Recommended by Toby Young, and 1 others. Toby YoungI’ve been a Tom Wolfe fan ever since my mother bought me The Electric Kool–Aid Acid Test when I was a teenager. I like nearly all of his work, particularly The Bonfire of the Vanities, but my all-time favourite is Radical Chic. It originally appeared as an essay in New York magazine, but was later published in book form alongside another essay, “Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers”. It’s an account of a... (Source)
As Sidney Zion observes in his introduction: "To write a great autobiography, you have to live it. And while most writers are lucky to life half a life and are seldom comfortable doing it, Ben Hecht lived a dozen worlds, enjoying them as if he were a citizen of each. Acrobat, magician, poet, newspaperman, author, screenwriter, propagandist---Hecht was all...
moreRecommended by Toby Young, and 1 others. Toby YoungI discovered Ben Hecht through His Girl Friday, one of the few great Hollywood films of the 1930s and 40s that he didn’t write. It was based on The Front Page, a play that Hecht co-authored with Charles MacArthur when they were both Chicago newspapermen. The Front Page is a vicious satire of drink-sodden hacks and the papers they worked for, but it’s also a tribute to them. Walter Burns, the... (Source)
William BoydEverybody remembers Fleet Street and journalism and Lord Copper and The Daily Beast but the novel is about a classic, almost Shakespearean, case of mistaken identity. (Source)
Robert CottrellJournalists would pride themselves on their amateurism, and Scoop shoves that back at them in spades. (Source)
William BoydEverybody remembers Fleet Street and journalism and Lord Copper and The Daily Beast but the novel is about a classic, almost Shakespearean, case of mistaken identity. (Source)
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