I was too young to experience the Late Night Wars. They were well over – or at least not as hostile – by the time I was able to stay up late enough to watch any of the Late Night offerings, but I did choose a side. I was a Letterman guy. 

At the time, I just preferred Letterman to Leno. Since then, I’ve enjoyed his post-Late Night era Netflix series “My Next Guest Needs No Introduction with David Letterman.” It was with a little fandom and even more curiosity, however, that I chose to pick up Letterman: The Last Giant of Late Night by Jason Zinoman.

There are some humanizing things in this book for the king of late night. It discusses his focus on failure, of any kind. It discusses some of his gradual distancing from his staff. But one of the most baffling to me is that his quadruple bypass surgery sort of cured his hypochondria. This is really more according to his staff, but it seems to have improved and afterward, he started to trust doctors. 

This book takes time out to put Letterman in proper context by building out a complete Late Night history from Steve Allen, Jack Paar, Johnny Carson, and Dick Cavett, so that you can historically contextualize Letterman and by extension Leno as what came next. This book focuses on Letterman’s rise to fame and how he reacted to said fame. 

It’s a compelling read not just because of the story and the complex person that is David Letterman, but also because Zinoman knows when to add some humor or irony into the mix. When talking about the context of reality TV and its Big Bang in the form of MTV’s “Real World,” Zinoman makes sure to hit the high note and remind you that this is a biography about comedy, parody, and satire. His line that by the early 90s, “You might say that Late Night with David Letterman became what happened when one talk-show host stopped being polite and started getting real,” is prescient and wonderful.

Zinoman captures three eras of Letterman in this book; his early radio stuff and morning show, his NBC show, and his CBS show. I know books have been written about the Late Night Wars, most notably The Late Shift by Bill Carter, which was also adapted as a film. For an in-depth look into who David Letterman is, was, and how we came to be that way, I’m not sure you can do any better than Letterman: The Last Giant of Late Night by Jason Zinoman.

Read the Secret File of technical information and quotes from Letterman: The Last Giant of Late Night.