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Title details for Conspiracy of Fools by Kurt Eichenwald - Available

Conspiracy of Fools

A True Story

by Kurt Eichenwald
Robertson Dean
Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
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1 of 1 copy available
From an award-winning New York Times reporter comes the full, mind-boggling true story of the lies, crimes, and ineptitude behind the Enron scandal that imperiled a presidency, destroyed a marketplace, and changed Washington and Wall Street forever.
It was the corporate collapse that appeared to come out of nowhere. In late 2001, the Enron Corporation—a darling of the financial world, a company whose executives were friends of presidents and the powerful—imploded virtually overnight, leaving vast wreckage in its wake and sparking a criminal investigation that would last for years.
Kurt Eichenwald transforms the unbelievable story of the Enron scandal into a rip-roaring narrative of epic proportions, taking readers behind every closed door—from the Oval Office to the executive suites, from the highest reaches of the Justice Department to the homes and bedrooms of the top officers. It is a tale of global reach—from Houston to Washington, from Bombay to London, from Munich to Sao Paolo—laying out the unbelievable scenes that twisted together to create this shocking true story.
Eichenwald reveals never-disclosed details of a story that features a cast including 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 Sumner Redstone. With its you-are-there glimpse into the secretive worlds of corporate power, Conspiracy of Fools is an all-true financial and political thriller of cinematic proportions.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Awards

  • Release date

    March 29, 2005

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9780739353363
      • File size: 880336 KB
      • Duration: 30:34:01

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Fictional mysteries should be written as well as this book, the story of how Enron rose and crashed using fraud and illegal accounting tricks. It is a long (25 CD's) story, but narrator Robertson Dean does an excellent job keeping the action moving. He starts out a bit too mellow and slow, but just when you think his voice will put you to sleep, Dean finds his rhythm and pacing. From that point on, Eichenwald gives Dean enough twists, turns, subterfuge and fuzzy math to keep us enthralled until the well chronicled conclusion. Dean does use his voice to emphasize ideas and reactions that might show the author to have a particular bias toward some characters. R.I.G. 2006 Audie Award Finalist (c) AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      January 10, 2005
      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, 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.

    • Library Journal

      December 1, 2005
      Enron was once a corporation revered by its stockholders, but suddenly in 2001 this Fortune 100 company was bankrupt, laying off thousands of workers, costing investors thousands of dollars, and toppling major accounting firm Arthur Andersen. How did this business that appeared to be thriving suddenly crash and burn? According to Eichenwald, a financial reporter for the "New York Times" who followed the collapse of Enron and the indictments of Ken Lay; CEO Jeffrey Skilling, the man who replaced Lay; CFO Andrew Fastow; and other Enron executives, the destruction of Enron was years in the making. "Conspiracy of Fools" starts with Lay's arrival and the corporate climb of Skilling and Fastow. Eichenwald tells the story in great detail, relying on court papers, interviews, government documents, and other resources. Robertson Dean does a fine job as reader and makes one want to continue listening. A long but satisfying book that will find a home in all libraries; it will be especially welcome in strong business collections." -Danna Bell-Russel, Library of Congress"

      Copyright 2005 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

    • AudioFile Magazine
      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. (c) AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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