The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron

by Bethany McLean, Peter Elkind, Joe Nocera (Foreword by)

Overview

The tenth-anniversary edition of the definitive account of the Enron scandal, updated with a new chapter
 
The Enron scandal brought down one of the most admired companies of the 1990s. Countless books and articles were written about it, but only The Smartest Guys in the Room holds up a decade later as the definitive narrative. For this tenth anniversary edition, McLean and Elkind have revisited the fall of Enron and its aftermath, in a new chapter that asks why Enron still matters. They also reveal the fates of the key players in the scandal.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781591846604
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	11/26/2013
Pages:	480
Sales rank:	96,177
Product dimensions:	8.80(w) x 6.00(h) x 1.40(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind collaborated on this book when they both were Fortune senior writers. McLean, a former investment banking analyst for Goldman Sachs, is now a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and lives in Chicago. Elkind, an award-winning investigative reporter, is now an editor-at-large for Fortune and lives in Fort Worth, Texas.

Read an Excerpt

On a cool Texas night in late January, Cliff Baxter slipped out of bed. He stuffed pillows under the covers so his sleeping wife wouldn’t notice he was gone. Then he stepped quietly through his large suburban Houston home, taking care not to awaken his two children. The door alarm didn’t make a sound as he entered the garage; he’d disabled the security system before turning in. Then, dressed in blue jogging slacks, a blue T-shirt, and moccasin slippers, he climbed into his new black Mercedes-Benz S500 and drove out into the night.
(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "The Smartest Guys in the Room"
by .
Copyright © 2013 Bethany McLean.
Excerpted by permission of Penguin Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

The Smartest Guys in the Room Authors' Notes and Acknowledgments
Cast of Characters
Our Values
Introduction

1. Lunch on a Silver Platter
2. Please Keep Making Us Millions
3. We Were the Apostles
4. The First Prima Donna
5. Guys with Spikes
6. The Empress of Energy
7. The 15 Percent Solution
8. A Recipe for Disaster
9. The Klieg-Light Syndrome
10. The Hotel Kenneth-Lay-a
11. Andy Fastow's Secrets
12. The Big Enchilada
13. An Unnatural Act
14. The Beating Heart of Enron
15. Everybody Loves Enron
16. When Pigs Could Fly
17. Gaming California
18. Bandwidth Hog
19. Ask Why, Asshole
20. I Want to Resign
21. The $45 Million Question
22. We Have No Cash!

Epilogue: Isn't Anybody Sorry?

Index

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“The best book about the Enron debacle to date.”
—BusinessWeek
 
“The authors write with power and finesse. Their prose is effortless, like a sprinter floating down the track.”
—USA Today
 
“Well-reported and well-written.”
—Warren Buffett

Editorial Reviews

The best book about the Enron debacle to date.”
—BusinessWeek
 
“The authors write with power and finesse. Their prose is effortless, like a sprinter floating down the track.”
—USA Today
 
“Well-reported and well-written.”
—Warren Buffett

From the Publisher