Michael Shnayerson

[2] His career started as a sportswriter for the weekly The Santa Fe Reporter in 1977 before moving on to become a staff writer for Time magazine, focusing on environmental stories, in 1978.

In 2002, he authored The Killers Within: The Deadly Rise of Drug-Resistant Bacteria before writing Coal River: How a Few Brave Americans Took On a Powerful Company - and the Federal Government - to Save the Land They Love in 2008.

In 2016, he wrote The Contender, an unauthorized biography of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo,[5] while his seventh book, BOOM: Mad Money, Mega Dealers, and the Rise of Contemporary Art was released in 2019.

[8] BOOM begins in the post-World War II period with the rise of abstract expressionism and its nurturing by dealers Peggy Guggenheim, Betty Parsons and Sidney Janis.

[9] It continues through Leo Castelli and the Pop Period, on through the 1980s most prominent dealers (Mary Boone, Larry Gagosian, Arne Glimcher) and the neo-expressionists they promoted (Julian Schnabel, Jean-Michel Basquiat, David Salle, Eric Fischl) through the fracturing of styles over the last three decades, and the explosive growth of the global contemporary art market.