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    Conspiracy of Fools: A True Story
    Unavailable
    Conspiracy of Fools: A True Story
    Unavailable
    Conspiracy of Fools: A True Story
    Audiobook (abridged)10 hours

    Conspiracy of Fools: A True Story

    Written by Kurt Eichenwald

    Narrated by Stephen Lang

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    From an award-winning New York Times reporter comes the full, mind-boggling story of the lies, crimes, and ineptitude behind the spectacular 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. But for all that has been written about the Enron debacle, no one has yet to re-create the full drama of what has already become a near-mythic American tale.

    Until now. With Conspiracy of Fools, Kurt Eichenwald transforms the unbelievable story of the Enron scandal into a rip-roaring narrative of epic proportions, one that is sure to delight readers of thrillers and business books alike, achieving for this new decade what books like Barbarians at the Gate and A Civil Action accomplished in the 1990's.

    Written in the roller-coaster style of a novel, the compelling narrative takes 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.


    From the Hardcover edition.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateMar 14, 2005
    ISBN9780739317709
    Unavailable
    Conspiracy of Fools: A True Story
    Author

    Kurt Eichenwald

    Kurt Eichenwald wrote for The New York Times for more than twenty years. A two-time winner of the George Polk Award for excellence in journalism, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 and 2002. He is the author of three bestselling books, one of which, The Informant, was made into a major motion picture. He lives in Dallas with his wife and three children. Visit him online at KurtEichenwald.com.

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    Reviews for Conspiracy of Fools

    4/5

    200 ratings11 reviews

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    • 4/5
      The story of the Enron debacle in great detail. I'm not an accounting guy but I learned a lot about it from this book. I really enjoyed this.
    • 4/5
      I read Smartest Guys in the Room a few years ago. I have surely forgotten all the details by now, but having read that book probably made this book more fun to read. This book doesn't lay out a continuous narrative, but jumps from scene to scene. It's pretty easy to stitch together the story from the scenes, but still I wonder if part of my ease was just that this was the second time through for me.Without a doubt the scenes that Eichenwald gives us include lots of rich details. This book definitely gives a solid telling of the Enron disaster.Eichenwald pretty much pins the disaster on Fastow. The other players look more like dupes. I can't say how accurate this is. It's definitely good motivation to learn a bit of accounting! And a nice portrayal of the difference between fraud and an attempt to provide accurate accounting.
    • 5/5
      One of the best books I ever read, fiction, thriller and drama all in one. Amazing
    • 5/5
      A riveting history of the Enron scandal. Reads like a novel. Very well-researched.
    • 5/5
      This large (nearly 700 pages) book is not the sort of thing I usually read. It is the true story of the Enron collapse nearly 10 years ago now. But Kurt Eichenwald, a New York Times reported who covered the financial beat and reported on the unfolding story has written a real page turner of a story that had me reading late into the night, enthralled. Let's just say it is no surprise to me now why our economy is in the shape it is in. Greed and politics are no strangers.The only weakness in the book is that it ends too soon, before you know what happened to the main players in the story, although a quick search of Google or Wikipedia will bring you up to speed. Suffice it to say, if you ever find yourself in this situation, make sure you are the first one running to the police offering to rat your fellows out. It will save you about 25 years behind bars.
    • 5/5
      An incredible feat of writing and reporting. A totally compelling read! However, it made me so angry with corporate America- they never learn. The same companies and the same motives- "money for nothing, get your kicks for free" has propelled this country into decades of financial crisis, including the doozy of a crisis we are emeshed in now. How Eichenwald and his staff were able to understand what the hell Enron was even doing on a daily basis is beyond me. All it seemed like they engaged in was cooking up more ways to steal and scheme- like 5 times a day, every day. It makes you sick.
    • 4/5
      Conspiracy of Fools is the story of Enron, from beginning to collapse, researched and presented in excruciating detail. It's a horror story of greed, incompetence, arrogance, and willful ignorance. And it's a cautionary tale depicting the importance of accounting. (dusting off my accounting degree here) It's also thought-provoking, particularly with regard to the contradictory nature of American business--what's good for the actual business isn't necessarily what's good for the stockholders, and vice versa.The first quarter or so of the book, I spent a lot of time flipping back to the the cast of characters in the front of the book, and being frustrated by the way it jumped between characters and POVs. After I became familiar with the major players, it read much more smoothly.The other thing that drove me nuts for quite a while was that so many scenes were described with precise dates, sometimes even down to the minute. I kept expecting those times to be significant in some way, but they never were. I eventually realized that it was supposed to be proof of how accurate the research was, but I just found it distracting.There's more detail than I expected, but in this kind of book, I appreciated that--it felt like I got a clearer picture of not only what happened, but why, and how it was allowed to happen.Other than that, it was fascinating, and horrifying. Reading it was like watching a series of train wrecks, or a horror movie where you're screaming at the bimbo not to go up the stairs, but she does anyway. I'm glad I read it.
    • 5/5
      This investigation of the Enron collapse is so good that you feel that your are there. Eichenwald explains the lax management and performance pressure that allows an arrogant, ignorant bad guy to occupy the chief financial officer position. He puts in his friends (e.g. treasurer) and robs the company for $60 million, loads it with debt and has no idea of its cash position while other top managers "invest" in billion dollar hare brained schemes.After half way through I couldn't put it down.
    • 5/5
      The Enron story. Thoroughly researched and shocking. A balanced treatment.
    • 4/5
      This is an enormously detailed, heavily researched account of the fall of Enron. It fails, however, to be the definitive account. Eichenwald presents a wealth of detail, but often falls short when it comes to the big picture. In that respect his book is inferior to McLean and Elkind's "Smartest Guys In The Room." Eichenwald also seems to have fallen prey to that pitfall of journalists everywhere, getting too close to one of his sources to be objective. He clearly spent a lot of time with Jeff Skilling in researching this book, and it tells--in a lot of places Eichenwald adopts the spin that Skilling has been using since Enron first collapsed: "It's all Fastow's fault," etc. Worth reading for the abundance of detail, but only as a supplement to other accounts.
    • 3/5
      The story told here focuses entirely on the downfall of Enron, without conveying a sense of what Enron did and how it managed to generate so much excitement. The other Enron book, The Rise and Fall of Enron (I think), is better although that one ends with the bankruptcy filing.