Hit & Run: How Jon Peters and Peter Guber Took Sony for a Ride in Hollywood.

• Author: Auletta, Ken

The non-book book is not a new phenomenon in publishing, but it has become more commonplace. Bob Woodward, among the best reporters on the planet, exploits the genre in The Choice, a rushed account of this year's presidential contest. It ends before either party has an official nominee and before the voters have spoken, but nevertheless clamors in June to tell us the dozen or so vice-presidential names on Bob Dole's mind in May.

A non-book differs from a book in several respects. It feels padded, reading more like a newspaper or magazine story in which a lack of time, adequate space, or brain matter keeps the writer from conveying complexity, perspective, gravitas. It trains its eye too much on today's headlines. And it too often prosecutes rather than explains. These are the chief failures of Hit & Run: How Jon Peters and Peter Guber Took Sony for a Ride in Hollywood, Nancy Griffin and Kim Masters's lively account of the breathtakingly dumb decisions Sony has made in Hollywood and the odious cast of characters behind them. As is common in the non-book book genre, the authors succeed in making the reader feel something--in this case, outrage--but fail to advance our understanding of the principal actors, particularly Peter Guber. A real book, a genuine biography, not only presents what someone does but helps us understand why they do it.

Not that Hit & Run doesn't have sterling moments. The extravagance of Hollywood, the conflicts of interest, and the nepotism are all amply recounted here. Jon Peters, who along with Guber was recruited to run the studio, emerges as a frighteningly engaging combination of thug, charmer, egomaniac, and naif--half illiterate, half marketing genius. Walter Yetnikoff, the record company impresario who recruited Peters and Guber, is hilarious, if unintentionally so, doing his impersonation of a mad Napoleon.

Anyone wanting to understand why the Japanese have generally fared so poorly in software as opposed to hardware will glimpse in this book how tone-deaf Sony executives were to people. The accounts of how Warner Bros. chairman Steve Ross and investment banker Herbert Allen took Sony America's chairman, Mickey Schulhof, to the cleaners are reason enough to argue that just as businessmen should be quarantined from politics, so physicists like Schulhof should stick to science.

What is missing from Hit & Run is Peter Guber. Not that his name is absent; he is mentioned throughout. He is the heavy, the greedy guy...