Conspiracy of Fools, Kurt Eichenwald
Conspiracy of Fools, Kurt Eichenwald
25 Rating(s)
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Conspiracy of Fools
A True Story

Author: Kurt Eichenwald

Narrator: Stephen Lang

Abridged: 9 hr 59 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 03/14/2005


Synopsis

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.

About The Author

Kurt Eichenwald has written about white-collar crime and corporate cor-ruption for The New York Times for more than a decade. A two-time winner of the prestigious George Polk award for excellence in journalism and a finalist for the 2000 Pulitzer Prize, he has been repeatedly selected by TJFR Business News Reporter as one of the nation's most influential financial journalists. For the Times, he has covered some of the highest-profile news stories emanating from the business world, including the Archer Daniels Midland story, and he is the author of Serpent on the Rock. Eichenwald lives in Westchester County, outside New York City, with his wife and three children.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Kirsti

Would YOU like to cause the biggest bankruptcy in American history? Sure you would! Well, Enron has already gone kablooey, losing billions of dollars, throwing more than 20,000 people out of work, and contributing to at least one suicide. But you can use the Enron approach to management at your comp......more

This book gives sobering data, while reading like a best-selling mystery--a bona fide page-turner. The book is particularly relevant when we put the story of Enron into perspective: Geo. W. Bush's longtime personal friendship with Enron head Ken Lay; Bush's own businesses in the 1980s--Arbusto and Sp......more

Goodreads review by Brian

Conspiracy of Fools is the fourth Enron-related tale I've read (Smartest Guys in the Room, Enron: The Rise and Fall, and Anatomy of Greed being the other three). In it, Eichenwald does a decent job of combining the best of the three others, as if he poached some from each. Conspiracy reads as a nove......more

Goodreads review by James

675 pages, but the writer has a talent for telling stories, and there are hundreds of stories here. Very pleasant and interesting to read. But is it all true? The author makes it sound like the slimey ratfink Andy Fastow was 90% to blame, and that Skilling and Lay barely knew what was going on. I fi......more


Quotes

Praise for Kurt Eichenwald’s bestseller, The Informant:

“Ranks with A Civil Action as one of the best nonfiction books of the last decade.”
New York Times Book Review

“The thriller of the year—and it’s all true!”
Dallas Morning News

“One of the most intriguing—and nearly unbelievable—nonfiction books in recent memory . . . a tangled tale worthy of John Le Carré.”
Portland Oregonian

“A compelling narrative . . . a business book for Grisham readers.”
Chicago Tribune

“Reads like a well-written whodunit.”
Denver Post

“A spellbinding account, as much of a page-turner as a Grisham novel.”
Washington Monthly

“I guarantee it’ll keep you reading late into the night.”
—Jonathan Harr, author of A Civil Action