The release date for the English version of 'The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron' by
Bethany McLean is Sep 2004. If you enjoy this novel, it is available for buy as a paperback from Barnes & Noble or Indigo, as an ebook on the Amazon Kindle store, or as an audiobook on Audible.
Numerous books have been written on Watergate, but only All the President's Men provided readers with the whole narrative, with all the drama, complexity, and insider information. And it remains the one book to read on Watergate if you only read one after thirty years. The greatest corporate scandal of our day is Enron, and Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, senior writers for Fortune, are the new Woodward and Bernstein.
Surprisingly, only two years ago, Enron's soaring earnings and share price made it seem like the perfect example of a New Economy business. That was, however, prior to a Fortune piece by McLean posing the apparently benign question, "How precisely does Enron make money?" After then, Enron's house of cards started to fall apart. In order to provide the definitive book on the Enron crisis and the intriguing individuals behind it, McLean and Elkind have now conducted far deeper research.
Smartest Guys in the Room delves deeply into Enron's background and beyond the closed doors of private meetings via meticulous research and character-driven storytelling. The book chronicles Enron's ascent from obscurity to the top of the corporate world and ultimately to its catastrophic collapse, drawing on a broad variety of unusual sources. It unveils previously unknown people like Cliff Baxter and Rebecca Mark along with more well-known ones like Andy Fastow, Jeff Skilling, and Ken Lay. The tale of greed, conceit, and dishonesty in Smartest Guys in the Room is a microcosm of all that is wrong with modern American business. It's a compelling human tale first and foremost, and it will wind up being the definitive story of the Enron affair.