Conspiracy of Fools by Kurt Eichenwald

I read a different book recently by this author, called The Informant. The Informant was made into a movie starring Matt Damon. I like that book well enough, that when I saw this one, it intrigued me. I've had a passing interest in the Enron disaster that happened back in the early 2000's. (One of the last books I finished, The Sellout, referenced the Enron disaster too.)

This authors M.O. is to conduct a bunch of interviews and review a bunch of documents, then attempt to reconstruct a story based on those interviews and documents. Both this one and the Informant were true stories of corporate wrong-doing. The Enron story focused on accounting "creativity", and how it led to the downfall of both Enron and Arthur Anderson (the accounting firm both advising and auditing Enron). Throughout this book, the author does a great job at trying to show who, exactly, within Enron was the culprit of the "irregularities" that led to the destruction of the company. (I put "creativity" and "irregularities" in quote for a reason - the author here tries to show that the accounting issues that Enron had were obviously wrong, and should've been obvious at many different points in the process.)

Overall, this was a great book. You come out of it cheering for some folks, and wondering how others were able to get away with what they did for so long. The author definitely paints the picture of who was most too blame, and who simply had their head in the sand. After getting about 2/3 of the way through, I Googled the main characters, to see what had ultimately happened to them after all this went down. It was interesting to see that the main instigator of the problems (at least, the one one portrayed in the book here) didn't appear to get too much punishment for what he'd done to the company (and collaterally - to Arthur Anderson).

Anyway, if you want a good summary of the Enron situation, and what caused it to collapse, this is a pretty good read!