The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron

There were dozens of books about Watergate, but onlyAll the President's Mengave readers the full story, with all the drama and nuance and exclusive reporting. And thirty years later, if you're going to read only one book on Watergate, that's still the one. Today, Enron is the biggest business story of our time, andFortunesenior writers Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind are the new Woodward and Bernstein.

Remarkably, it was just two years ago that Enron was thought to epitomize a great New Economy company, with its skyrocketing profits and share price. But that was beforeFortunepublished an article by McLean that asked a seemingly innocent question: How exactly does Enron make money? From that point on, Enron's house of cards began to crumble. Now, McLean and Elkind have investigated much deeper, to offer the definitive book about the Enron scandal and the fascinating people behind it.

Meticulously researched and character driven,Smartest Guys in the Roomtakes the reader deep into Enron's past—and behind the closed doors of private meetings. Drawing on a wide range of unique sources, the book follows Enron's rise from obscurity to the top of the business world to its disastrous demise. It reveals as never before major characters such as Ken Lay, Jeff Skilling, and Andy Fastow, as well as lesser known players like Cliff Baxter and Rebecca Mark.Smartest Guys in the Roomis a story of greed, arrogance, and deceit—a microcosm of all that is wrong with American business today. Above all, it's a fascinating human drama that will prove to be the authoritative account of the Enron scandal.

Staff Favorite of 2003

TheFortunejournalists who first broke the story reveal the devastating truth about the swift and shocking collapse of Enron. Their definitive portraits of the scandal's key players -- unsparingly rendered in all their drunken hubris, unrelenting ambition, and self-destructive greed -- as well as a masterful revelation of the company's innermost workings, make this book fully deserving of the broad critical acclaim it has garnered.