Exposing the empire

From a 21-year staff veteran, one fears a history of National Geographic might amount to a limp Valentine for a creaky institution. But for every helping of august history (names such as Bingham, Earhart, Leakey, Cousteau and Goodall pepper the pages), Poole uses his back pages to hammer in double doses of expose.

The result is a behind-the-scenes drama of wealth, ambition, exploration and much ugly behavior, such as a 1937 feature praising Nazi Berlin and its Hitler Youth. Accounts of seething interoffice clashes of the 1990s that wrested the magazine from editors and put it in the pockets of “quick-buck artists ... marketing experts, lawyers, advertising executives and accountants” leave little doubt about Poole’s sympathies (he retired as executive editor in 2001). His account of the origins of the magazine is an insightful read in what is an enormously entertaining book.

-- Chuck Thompson