The Last Tycoons: The Secret History of Lazard Frères & Co.

If investment banking and the history of big deals fascinate you, getAbstract invites you to sit down with this compelling history of Lazard Frères & Co., from its humble beginnings through its astounding success. The stories of the dominant personalities who used the Lazard mystique to garner unbelievable fees are legendary. As a former journalist and Lazard banker, William D. Cohan has the skill and qualifications to tell this story. While he covers many of Lazard's biggest men and biggest deals, he never bogs down in technical details. The author focuses on the firm's leaders, and shows their personalities, strengths and foibles. These stories cover shocking self-interest and staggering amounts of money. This large book has a cast of hundreds; it is attributed carefully and well-indexed, though it could use a personnel timeline. Cohan keeps you on track by focusing on the men who led Lazard over the 157 years that it was a family firm. Many of the personal revelations are quite sensational and the book is almost always entertaining.

This book gives in-depth details of the history of this secretive and enigmatic bank. The first part on the origins of Lazard as a dry goods company in New-Orleans, then San Francisco is interesting. But the story gets truly riveting, when you get to see Lazard legendary M & A bankers in the day to day exercise of their craft. The characters, André, Felix and Michel are bigger than life, and at times downright Machavielian.

Cohan has brought to life a vivid and spellbinding tale of the legendary giants in the investment banking field (Meyer, Rohatyn, David-Weill, Rattner, and Wasserstein) at Lazard, offering a compelling and revealing portrait of the relentless personalities that invented, dominated and defined the last few decades of M & A banking. At the same time, The Last Tycoons is, at its core, a saga of ambition, egotism, greed, vanity and pride of Shakespearean proportions played out on the grand stage of corporate takeovers and national politics. What emerges is not a noble picture of what these ostensibly "Great Men" purported themselves to be. Instead, it is apparent that at Lazard, the black arts of power and greed were the currency used to exhort and extort men of high ambition and intellect to achieve stature and enormous fees. The long shadow of Andre Meyer (unquestionably a Sith Lord) looms over the Lazard partnership and his protégés and successors, Felix Rohatyn and Michel David-Weill. Meyer was a brilliant financier with no peer with the exception of Bruce Wasserstein and it's fitting and deserving that the story of Lazard begins and ends with these two men. In between, Michel and Felix weave a complex and fascinating legacy of fear and loathing in the intervening decades. For bankers and professionals in the field, Cohan's detail and emotional and psychological nuances will be tantalizing and relevant. For those aspiring to enter the field, it's a cautionary tale - it's very hard to play on the big stage on Wall St without darkening your soul. This story is destined to be a Classic amongst Barbarians and Den of Thieves

maybe the first casualty of wealth is self-knowledge. that is the takeaway from William Cohan's fine history of the fabled lazard freres banking house. in these pages we watch titans of finance gloat and preen while their castle crumbles from corruption and mismanagement. Its a terrific story peopled with fascinating characters. who wouldn't, after reading this book, want to dine with the formidable felix rohatyn. He fled the Nazis as a boy, rescued New York from financial ruin and ditched Lazard at just the right moment to serve the nation as Bill Clinton's Ambassador to France. His intellect and achievement dominate the book, just as Felix dominated wall street for a generation. His departure from the firm caps the end of "the great man" era in investment banking. In Rohatyn's day only a select handful of wise men could be trusted to guide transactions. Nowadays all you need is armani and a spread sheet. Even as he maps the tectonic movement in investment banking, Cohan keeps it light with plenty of well-researched dish on criminal investigations, love affairs, fabulous art collections, New Yorkana and the occasional drop to earth by some of Lazard's wax-winged partners. I closed the book -- a whopping 750 pp's -- edified and thoroughly entertained.

When Bill, an old friend, told me he was writing a book about Lazard, I thought, "Who will care?" I was ignorant. My only obligation was to buy the book, not to read it. Even if I had not known the author, I would not have been able to put this book down. Writing is a lonely pursuit, and the endless thought and organization, the hundreds of interviews on both sides of the Atlantic, the researching and re-drafting, all make the author's dedication, and the reader's, worthwhile. Lazard was truly the first global Wall Street firm. Andre Meyer, the brilliant global pioneer, comes to life. Felix Rohatyn, away from the deserved platitudes, is complex; Michel David-Weill Machiavellian. Bruce Wasserstein, prototypically capitalist, can exist only on Wall Street. Steve Rattner alone comes across as someone for whom an investment banker would want to work. The rudderless leadership for decades, the infighting among the partners, the lack of organizational cohesion all bar the firm from the top tier. The extraordinary access Cohan had to the principals and many others suggest there was much to tell. Cohan's natural wit and cynicism spice the story. Some have criticized the author for using secondary sources. As one who did not read many of those articles, I was delighted he included them. That Wasserstein alone did not cooperate further excuses Cohan from consulting secondary sources to complete the tale.