The Last Great Ride (1992)

In the decade Brandon Tartikoff spent leading NBC from worst to first, he must have amassed enough pungent, rivalrous inside stories to fill a book. The Last Great Ride, however, is Memoir Lite — a brief, breezy, jumbled collection of after-dinner How-I-Did-It anecdotes in which Tartikoff recounts the genesis of The Cosby Show, Cheers, Hill Street Blues, and their like. The stories are wittily told, even if the writing often sinks to ''The rest, as they say, is history.'' But don't look for gossip here: Tartikoff, who was head of Paramount Pictures, burns no bridges, not even the one connecting him to Mr. T. C+