Every era has its merger; every era has its story. For the New Media age it was an even bigger disaster: the AOL-Time Warner deal. At the time AOL and Time Warner were considered a matchless combination of old media content and new media distribution. But very soon after the deal was announced things started to go bad—and then from bad to worse. Less than four years after the deal was announced, every significant figure in the deal -save the politically astute Richard Parsons—has left the company, along with scores of others. Nearly a $100 billion was written off and a stock that once traded at $100 now trades near $10. What happened? Where did it all go wrong? In this deeply sourced and deftly written book, Nina Munk gives us a window into the minds of two of the oddest men to ever run billion-dollar empires. Steve Case, the boy wonder who built AOL one free floppy disk at a time, was searching for a way out of the New Economy. Meanwhile Jerry Levin, who'd made his reputation as a visionary when he put HBO on satellite distribution, was searching for a monumental deal. These two men, more interested in their place in history than their personal fortunes, each thought they were out-smarting the other.

A fully illustrated, stylish look back at the story behind a Canadian design icon. For a decade, in the 1960s, the Clairtone Sound Corporation captured the spirit of the times: sophisticated, cosmopolitan, liberated. From its modern oiled-walnut and teak consoles to its minimalist logo and cheeky marketing materials, Clairtone produced a body of design work that is still today contemporary. Founded in 1958 by two Canadian upstarts, Peter Munk and David Gilmour, the fledgling manufacturer of hi-fi and TV consoles quickly became known for its iconic designs and masterful advertising campaigns. Its Project G stereo, winner of the silver medal at the 1964 Milan Triennale, with its space-age styling, and costing as much as a small car, was the epitome of bachelor pad cool. Famously, Hugh Hefner owned a Project G. So did Frank Sinatra. In 1967, suggesting how deeply it had come to be identified with popular culture, a Project G appeared in The Graduate alongside Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft. Richly illustrated with more than two hundred images, The Art of Clairtone is a candid and intimate look at the company's skyrocketing success and sensational collapse. Through the personal and private recollections of those who knew Clairtone best, from its founders to its designers, engineers, and salesmen, and with comments from Karim Rashid, Douglas Coupland, Tyler Brule, and Bruce Mau, this elegant book captures the influence and spirit of an iconoclastic company that seemed to represent all the promise of Canada.