Conspiracy of Fools: A True Story

商家名称	信用等级	购买信息	订购本书
		Conspiracy of Fools: A True Story
		Conspiracy of Fools: A True Story

基本信息·出版社：Broadway
·页码：784 页
·出版日期：2005年12月
·ISBN：0767911792
·条形码：9780767911795
·版本：Paperback
·装帧：平装
·开本：16
·外文书名：傻瓜的阴谋

内容简介 In 2000, when The Informant was published, few would've imagined that a story about price fixing at Archer Daniels Midland could be as un-put-downable as the best crime fiction. Yet critics—and consumers—agreed: The New York Times reporter Kurt Eichenwald had taken the stuff of dry business reporting and turned it into an unparalleled page-turner. With Conspiracy of Fools, Eichenwald has done it again.

Say the name "Enron" and most people believe they've heard all about the story that imperiled a presidency, destroyed a marketplace, and changed Washington and Wall Street forever. But in the hands of Kurt Eichenwald, the players we think we know and the business practices we think have been exposed are transformed into entirely new—and entirely gripping—material. The cast includes but is not limited to George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Paul O'Neill, Harvey Pitt, Colin Powell, Gray Davis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Alan Greenspan, Ken Lay, Andy Fastow, Jeff Skilling, Bill Clinton, Rupert Murdoch, and Michael Eisner. Providing a you-are-there glimpse behind closed doors in the executive suites of the Enron Corporation, the Texas governor's mansion, the Justice Department, and even the Oval Office, Conspiracy of Fools is an all-true financial and political thriller of cinematic proportions.


作者简介 has written for the New York Times for more than seventeen years. A two-time winner of the George Polk Award for excellence in journalism and a finalist for the 2000 Pulitzer Prize, he has been selected repeatedly for the TJFR Business News Reporter as one of the nation’s most influential financial journalists. His last book, The Informant is currently in development as a major motion picture. He lives in Dallas with his wife and three children.


媒体推荐 From AudioFile
If this audiobook were a court of law, the Enron bosses would be found guilty of everything but murder. Using financial schemes as unsound as chain letters and pyramid schemes, the greedy and corrupt corporate executives caused the company's predictable crash to bankruptcy. Peppered with the locker-room profanities of participants, the story of the complicated financial maneuvers defies comprehension, but the narrator does not. Without unwarranted theatrics, Stephen Lang's clever portrayal of numerous conversations adds needed color; his prose flows with changing inflections that maintain one's interest level. The painful revelations in this production may make Enron investors cry as hard as they did the first time their mothers read them BAMBI. J.A.H. ? AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine-- Copyright ? AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist
New York Times reporter Eichenwald has now accomplished with the Enron scandal what he did with the ADM scandal in The Informant, rendering complex corporate skulduggery in the form of a page-turning financial thriller. Eichenwald carefully details the characters and business shenanigans that led to the demise of Enron, taking with it the respected accounting firm Arthur Andersen and the pensions of hundreds of its workers. Eichenwald puts the scandal in the broader context of an environment of rampant lawbreaking among corporations pursuing aggressive accounting and other business practices that offered huge rewards and incredible risks in the 1990s. The cast of characters includes Enron CEO Ken Lay, Jeff Skilling, and Andy Fastow and extends to political and business figures such as the first President Bush and the current one, President Clinton, Alan Greenspan, Dick Cheney, and Rupert Murdoch. The setting ranges from Houston to Washington, D.C., and Bombay to London. Eichenwald details the internal battles over turf, ideas, and influence as the company hurtled from one outrageous deal to another, all the time ignoring warning signals inside and outside of the firm from accountants, analysts, and reporters. In a convergence of "shocking incompetence, unjustified arrogance, compromised ethics and an utter contempt for the market's judgment," Enron undertook complicated financing structures that transformed it from a company of pipelines and rigs to one of abstract, intangible investments. Once Enron secured permission from the Securities Exchange Commission to change accounting rules more in line with those of investment bankers than oil drillers, the company was on its way, never mind the wildly contradictory nature of its financing strategy. This book compares with Liar's Poker and Barbarians at the Gate in its breadth and depth of coverage of esoteric corporate culture and financial practices, recognizing the compelling human drama beneath the scandal. Vanessa Bush
编辑推荐 Amazon.com
Enron was a $100-billion-a-year company in October 2001--America's seventh-largest. The Houston-based energy firm enjoyed warm ties with newly installed President George W. Bush. Earnings were up 26 percent from the previous quarter, while Fortune magazine had named Enron the country's most innovative company six years in a row. Less than two months later, Enron filed for bankruptcy in the biggest corporate failure in history. Enron became synonymous with the greed and fraud of the go-go high-tech stock bubble of the late 1990s--the worst of a series of spectacular corporate collapses that also took down WorldCom, Tyco, and Global Crossing.
What went wrong? Veteran New York Times financial journalist Kurt Eichenwald does an epic job of telling Enron's story in his 742-page tome Conspiracy of Fools. Eichenwald, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2000, also authored The Informant, an acclaimed account of a vast international price-fixing scandal at Archer Daniels Midland. Conspiracy of Fools tells the Enron tale with a cinematic narrative style, relying almost exclusively on scene and dialogue to bring his account to vivid life. We see how federal regulators opened the doors for the Enron fraud early on when they let the company loosen up its accounting rules and essentially cook its books. We read how Enron bullied Wall Street firms into issuing favorable reports about its share price by threatening to take away lucrative banking fees. Eichenwald also reveals how Enron manipulated electricity prices during the California energy crisis of 2000. Eichenwald's book is less successful in situating the Enron debacle in its wider context--the cycle of market speculation that reached a historic summit in the dot-com bubble. Was Enron just a cautionary sign of the greed and lack of ethics of a few bad apples, or was it more symptomatic of an entire market system? That may be a debate for another book. --Alex Roslin --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.


专业书评 From Publishers Weekly
This enormous, intimate blow-by-blow of Enron's implosion gets as close to what actually happened, in terms of people making (bad) decisions in real time, as anyone who wasn't there with a concealed video-phone possibly could. Having combed endless documents and interviewed countless principals and peripherals, Eichenwald (The Informant) presents short declarative sentences (and lots of sentence fragments) that may have run through the heads of men like top executives Skilling, Lay and Fastow as they managed to cook a very large set of books, as well as men like Stuart Zisman, a lawyer in the firm's wholesale division who wrote an early memo titled "Overall Book Manipulation" that stated "the majority of investments being introduced to Raptor are bad ones." Eichenwald's bald depictions ("Skilling sank deeper into depression"; "It couldn't be true, [Anderson partner Tom] Bauer thought") make for real tension. Collegial meetings at the White House with Dick Cheney, Colin Powell and others; charged conference calls with skeptical investors; endless buy-ins, buyouts and acronyms—all are presented in a rat-a-tat style thick with corporate anxiety, keeping pages turning even as the details themselves are numbing. (Luckily, Eichenwald includes a "Cast of Characters" and "List of Deals" so that readers can remind themselves of past carnage.) As an unadorned attempt to get into the heads of some major manipulators, this book can hardly be bettered. (On sale Mar. 8)
Copyright ? Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Bookmarks Magazine
The Enron story remains the same, no matter how many times it’s retold. In matters of style, at least, Conspiracy of Fools trumps the other books on the subject. Critics’ pens dangle like swords of Damocles over the cinematic scenes that are central to the book’s appeal: Can dialogue be recounted so accurately after 20 years of echoes? Maybe not. But 40 pages of detailed source notes buy Eichenwald some relief from the red ink. There are nitpicks: Enron executive Andrew Fastow comes across as a less rounded character than Jeff Skilling and Ken Lay (both of whom were interviewed extensively for the book), and Eichenwald pays little attention to analyzing why the gross misconduct was able to occur. But Eichenwald’s keen storytelling ability carries him across these speed bumps.

Copyright ? 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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