‘Condé Nast’ offers a discerning portrait of the publishing icon

There’s a certain pleasing irony to the fact that Condé Nast is today remembered as a brand rather than as a man; it’s a thing that would probably have given the man himself the pleasing sense of a job well done. 

But Nast was a person before he was a publishing empire, and as Susan Ronald points out in “Condé Nast: The Man and His Empire," her beguiling new book, he’s only had one