Ted Turner is the best – known maverick media mogul in the world. He's also a pretty elusive guy when it comes to revealing things about himself. We may think we know a lot about him – a colorful, energetic Southern entrepreneur who founded cable powerhouses TBN and CNN, a serious land baron, a champion sailor and winner of the America's Cup, a high – profile baseball owner, a movie producer, a noted philanthropist and the other half of an oft – publicized marriage to Jane Fonda. But despite Turner's reputation as an outspoken nonconformist, in fact precious little has been published that reveals the man behind the curtain.
There have been attempts to capture the real Turner, mainly veteran journalist Ken Auletta's Media Man: Ted Turner's Improbable Empire (2004), which expanded on the author's 2001 New Yorker profile. Auletta offered plenty in the way of incidental details but, alas, not enough in the realm of keen firsthand understanding. Also previously, there was Ted Turner Speaks: Insights from the World's Greatest Maverick (1999) by Janet Lowe, which gathered the wit and wisdom of the man in quotable chunks ("Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell, and advertise"). Fun, but not incisive.
So the announcement of the publication of
