CAMP

Michael Eisner

(one star)

Warner Books, $22.95

DISNEY’S Michael Eisner has been one of the most powerful men in Hollywood for more than two decades. But in the past few years, he’s suffered constant attacks for his stewardship of the Magic Kingdom.

So you’d expect a new book by the Disney CEO to offer a spirited defense against dissident shareholders – most notably Roy Disney – tell his side of the battles with Jeffrey Katzenberg and Michael Ovitz, go inside the acrimonious split with Pixar, etc.

Right?

Wrong.

Eisner, whose 1998 memoir, “Work in Progress,” did deal with business, ignores it entirely in his latest work, “Camp.”

Instead, Eisner, 63, has gone all cuddly, like something out of “Winnie the Pooh,” penning a love letter to his boyhood sleep-away camp – a place called Keewaydin, in the wilds of Vermont.

If Eisner is trying to salvage his reputation that was skewered earlier this year in James Stewart’s “Disney War,” which asserted he “squandered Disney’s assets,” this book fails. If he’s trying to recruit campers, he should have more success. It would be too easy to call “Camp” a Mickey Mouse book.

Unfortunately, at 182 pages – including a glossary with terms such as “Fort (n): Bathroom” and “Papoosiwog (n): Name for those in their fourth year in camp” – the book is overlong and in dire need of editing.

How many times do we need to read that Eisner’s father and uncles (and his children, too) also went to Keewaydin? The author understandably seems to get pretty emotional over that fact, but a reader might think, “very nice, but enough already.”

Throughout the book, Eisner slathers praise on longtime head of the camp, an octogenarian called Waboos. Oh, and he’s Waboos pretty much blind now, we’re told – again and again.

From this reading, Waboos is some kind of Yoda-Dalai Lama-Lewis & Clark combo.

Chapters wander from the long-ago past (Eisner’s father and the ubiquitous Waboos were campers in the 1920s) to the present and to the closer past, in no particular order.

The one sort-of compelling part of the story is Eisner’s introduction of two urban Southern California kids, Quenton “Q” Spratley and Pepe Molina, who attend the camp on a scholarship from Eisner’s foundation. But we never hear from them, just the author’s take on what the Keewaydin experience is like for them.

And while Eisner also offers some amusing tales about himself – such as when his parents let him drive himself to camp at age 16 and he got a speeding ticket and nearly into a fight with a truck driver he passed three times – he also inserts seemingly random tales into the book.

There’s a date he went on at camp, which didn’t amount to anything; and a tennis match he lost to a friend at camp 50 years ago, which he’s still moaning about; and the time he discovered some Nazi graffiti on an overturned van near his parents’ Vermont farm.

Maybe the most telling thing about Eisner’s slight, vanity book is that it’s published by Warner Books, and not by Disney’s own imprint, Hyperion.

But one thing you might want to remember from “Camp” – if you ever run into Michael Eisner and need a favor, maybe a job, from him, or just want to be friendly, offer this greeting: “Niminwenindam Kikeniminan.” It’s Algonquin, it says in the book, for “I am happy to know you.”