Much of the usual advice about damage control and crisis PR is self-serving, self-congratulatory, self-deceiving—and flat-out wrong.

If you're facing a lawsuit, a sex scandal, a defective product, or allegations of insider trading, most PR experts will tell you to stay positive, show some remorse, and everything will be just fine. But that approach reflects a naïve understanding of conflict, and it won't help you much during a real crisis.

No one knows this better than Eric Dezenhall and John Weber, who help companies, politicians, and celebrities get out of various kinds of trouble. In this brutally honest and eye-opening guide, they take you behind the scenes of some of the biggest public relations successes—and debacles—of modern business, politics, and entertainment.

You'll discover:

• Why the 1982 Tylenol cyanide-poisoning case is always cited as the best model for damage control, when in fact it has no relevance to the typical corporate crisis.

• Why Audi never fully recovered from driver accusations of "sudden acceleration"—despite evidence that nothing was wrong with their cars.

• What the crises faced by George W. Bush, Jim McGreevey, Sammy Sosa, Lance Armstrong, Martha Stewart, Coca-Cola, and the Catholic Church have in common . . . and what they don't.