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Bottom of the pile
19
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
28/100Critics
10/100Scholars
Author:
James Andrew Miller
Publisher:
Henry Holt and Co.
Date:
November 23, 2021
An oral history of HBO that recounts how it burst onto the American scene and screen to detonate a revolution and transform our relationship with television forever.
What The Reviewers Say
Tinderbox is both the origin story of virtually everything HBO has ever shown and an exhaustive chronicle of executive brainstorms, tantrums, courage, backstabbing and worse.
There’s enough animosity, jealousy, score-settling and killing gossip in Tinderbox, James Andrew Miller’s mountainous new oral history of HBO, to fill an Elizabethan drama. Yet the book’s tone is largely fond.
Miller did an exceptional job getting important people on the record and at length. That, unfortunately, is only half the job, and often the better you are at it, the harder the other half of the job—putting the book together in a cohesive way—gets. There is so much ground to cover, from 1971 to the present day. Organizing it all so that it flows well and gives readers the context they need is a gargantuan task, and Tinderbox doesn’t come close to fulfilling it.
... an exhaustive account of the network’s pioneering projects. In a well-rendered, frequently surprising chronicle, the author covers seemingly every inch of ground.
