Conspiracy of Fools

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

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.

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"

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