What Went Wrong at Enron: Everyone's Guide to the Largest Bankruptcy in U.S. History

The author makes a complicated area accessible to the general public in a careful, thoughtful way without distracting from the readibility; a masterful performance.

Let me start by admitting that I lost a tidy sum of money in the whole Enron disaster and would be happy never to see that word again. Then I saw Richard Pachter's rave review of this book in the Miami Herald and figured that maybe I could learn something from reading it. I had no idea of some of the things that Enron up to (criminal problems as far back as the 1980s) and the authors do an excellent job of fitting all the pieces together. I only wish that someone could for once write a book like this before disaster strikes.

This book is intended for the lay person. For a quick and easy to understand version of what happened at Enron, read this book. The authors do a good job at summarizing the management personalities, company culture, use of special purpose entities and deception that ultimately led to Enron's debacle.

This books lays out all the gory details of the greed and incompetence that killed Enron. The book works because of the understated and slyly entertaining way that it goes about unraveling the Enron bankruptcy. It is particularly effective because rather than being all preachy and sanctimonious, it presents all the necessary facts and background material to let the reader reach her own conclusions.The real clue to what the book is about is in the section at the end of the book called "The Enron Files," which contains copies of everything from deal approval sheets that are missing Jeffrey Skilling's signature to the "suicide note" left by Cliff Baxter. These exhibits, though some of them are difficult to read given that they were reduced to fit on a single page, give the whole Enron case a certain X-Files quality. Indeed, the book reads a lot like what Special Agents Dana Scully and Fox Mulder might have written about the case--combining Scully's scientific objectivity with Mulder's talent for psychological profiling of the major perps--in this case Lay, Skilling, and Fastow. Like any good X-Files episode, it raises more questions that it answers. What is truly scary about the whole affair is that there is no alien conspiracy to blame it on, just the lax governmental oversight that Enron bought and paid for with its campaign contributions.What Went Wrong at Enron is certainly not the last word on this scandal and deals only tangentially with the other scandals that are popping up all around it. Given that story on these scandals is only just beginning, it may be a long time (if ever) until the complete story can be written. Until then, this book provides the important first step in solving the mystery that is Enron.

This is the first, all in one, understandable explanation of Enron, what it did, and how it all fell apart. Makes the news understandable.