The book features the history of ESPN and how it was a network that almost didn't happen. They also get into what the culture at ESPN is like. Apparently it's based out of a tiny town in Connecticut (Bristol). The town is supposedly very boring and that boredom helps drive a number of illicit behaviors in the ESPN offices. A Time article I read (http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,2073818,00.html) says this: The culture in Bristol was intense, and intensely male. Betting on games was epidemic. There were drugs. There was sexual harassment. There was sex in the stairwells. "We had no social life because we worked all the time," an early director of production says. "There were a lot of interoffice romances going on because you didn't have a chance to meet anybody else...People who you never thought would get divorced were getting divorced, and a lot of those guys didn't have any regard for women." The company kept an apartment in Manhattan, and at one point it came out that some of the secretaries were turning tricks there, pimped by a guy in the mail room.
That description right there put the book on my wish list because I shamelessly love juicy tell-alls like this. But the book also talks about ESPN became the sports behemoth that the are and they also give us background behind prominent stories/events by the network. From the reviews I've read about the book, it sounds like ESPN functions a lot like a duck: smooth sailing and easy breezy on the surface, but underneath it's a snarly, fast paced mess.
TIDBITS: This is a long book at 763 pages. That's a long book about ESPN. Also, the same authors of this book did a similar book on SNL: Live from New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live, as told by its Stars, Writers and Guests.
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