A Passion to Win

In one of the most fascinating business autobiographies of this year, Sumner Redstone tells the unvarnished story of how he overcame every obstacle to build a vast media and entertainment engine that includes Paramount, MTV, Simon & Schuster, CBS, Nickleodeon and Blockbuster. A larger-than-life figure in the grand tradition of the Hearsts, Paleys and Pulitzers, and voted by 600 corporate executives as the number one most inspiring CEO, this is the man who can truely say "I am Viacom". "A Passion to Win" gives a riveting look behind the scenes at the highly charged negotiations that won Redstone both Viacom and Paramount. The book reveals Redstone's head-to-head confrontations with such adversaries as Barry Diller and H.Wayne Huizenga. Born in a Boston tenament Redstone went through Harvard in three years, was chosen for a special cryptography unit in the US Army whose assignment was to crack Japanese codes during WWII, then after Harvard Law School successfully pleaded cases before the US Court of Appeals and the US Supreme Court - all of this before embarking upon his business career.