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David Nasaw. The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000. 687 pp. $35.
At first, it is hard to believe that the world needs yet another book on William Randolph Hearst. We have been well served by William Swanberg's Citizen Hearst, even though it was written forty years ago, and more recent books have been unimaginative retellings of familiar tales. Nonetheless, David Nasaw's The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst is well worth reading.
There's much to enjoy in this book. The author writes in an engaging and informative style, making good use of a vast array of new documents, letters and thousands of telegrams released by the Hearst family and the Hearst Corporation. The result is a book that provides new insights into Hearst's life and business, as well as into the world in which Hearst lived. It is a fascinating story of a egocentric self-promoter who just happened to own the nation's largest media company throughout the first half of the twentieth century.
Given history's long fascination...