From Publishers Weekly
This enormous, intimate blow-by-blow of Enron's implosion gets as close to what actually happened, in terms of people making (bad) decisions in real time, as anyone who wasn't there with a concealed video-phone possibly could. Having combed endless documents and interviewed countless principals and peripherals, Eichenwald (The Informant) presents short declarative sentences (and lots of sentence fragments) that may have run through the heads of men like top executives Skilling, Lay and Fastow as they managed to cook a very large set of books, as well as men like Stuart Zisman, a lawyer in the firm's wholesale division who wrote an early memo titled "Overall Book Manipulation" that stated "the majority of investments being introduced to Raptor are bad ones." Eichenwald's bald depictions ("Skilling sank deeper into depression"; "It couldn't be true, [Anderson partner Tom] Bauer thought") make for real tension. Collegial meetings at the White House with Dick Cheney, Colin Powell and others; charged conference calls with skeptical investors; endless buy-ins, buyouts and acronyms—all are presented in a rat-a-tat style thick with corporate anxiety, keeping pages turning even as the details themselves are numbing. (Luckily, Eichenwald includes a "Cast of Characters" and "List of Deals" so that readers can remind themselves of past carnage.) As an unadorned attempt to get into the heads of some major manipulators, this book can hardly be bettered. (On sale Mar. 8) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
New York Times reporter Eichenwald has now accomplished with the Enron scandal what he did with the ADM scandal in The Informant, rendering complex corporate skulduggery in the form of a page-turning financial thriller. Eichenwald carefully details the characters and business shenanigans that led to the demise of Enron, taking with it the respected accounting firm Arthur Andersen and the pensions of hundreds of its workers. Eichenwald puts the scandal in the broader context of an environment of rampant lawbreaking among corporations pursuing aggressive accounting and other business practices that offered huge rewards and incredible risks in the 1990s. The cast of characters includes Enron CEO Ken Lay, Jeff Skilling, and Andy Fastow and extends to political and business figures such as the first President Bush and the current one, President Clinton, Alan Greenspan, Dick Cheney, and Rupert Murdoch. The setting ranges from Houston to Washington, D.C., and Bombay to London. Eichenwald details the internal battles over turf, ideas, and influence as the company hurtled from one outrageous deal to another, all the time ignoring warning signals inside and outside of the firm from accountants, analysts, and reporters. In a convergence of "shocking incompetence, unjustified arrogance, compromised ethics and an utter contempt for the market's judgment," Enron undertook complicated financing structures that transformed it from a company of pipelines and rigs to one of abstract, intangible investments. Once Enron secured permission from the Securities Exchange Commission to change accounting rules more in line with those of investment bankers than oil drillers, the company was on its way, never mind the wildly contradictory nature of its financing strategy. This book compares with Liar's Poker and Barbarians at the Gate in its breadth and depth of coverage of esoteric corporate culture and financial practices, recognizing the compelling human drama beneath the scandal. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

From the Inside Flap
In 2000, when The Informant was published, few would’ve imagined that a story about price fixing at Archer Daniels Midland could be as un-put-downable as the best crime fiction. Yet critics—and consumers—agreed: The New York Times reporter Kurt Eichenwald had taken the stuff of dry business reporting and turned it into an unparalleled page-turner. With Conspiracy of Fools, Eichenwald has done it again.

Say the name “Enron” and most people believe they’ve heard all about the story that imperiled a presidency, destroyed a marketplace, and changed Washington and Wall Street forever. But in the hands of Kurt Eichenwald, the players we think we know and the business practices we think have been exposed are transformed into entirely new—and entirely gripping—material. The cast includes but is not limited to George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Paul O’Neill, Harvey Pitt, Colin Powell, Gray Davis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Alan Greenspan, Ken Lay, Andy Fastow, Jeff Skilling, Bill Clinton, Rupert Murdoch, and Michael Eisner. Providing a you-are-there glimpse behind closed doors in the executive suites of the Enron Corporation, the Texas governor’s mansion, the Justice Department, and even the Oval Office, Conspiracy of Fools is an all-true financial and political thriller of cinematic proportions.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"It was the corporate collapse that appeared to come out of nowhere. In late 2001, the Enron Corporation - a darling of the financial world, a company whose executives were friends of presidents and the powerful - imploded virtually overnight, leaving vast wreckage in its wake and sparking a criminal investigation that would last for years." "With Conspiracy of Fools, Kurt Eichenwald takes readers behind every closed door - from the Oval Office to the executive suites, from the highest reaches of the Justice Department to the homes and bedrooms of the top officers. It is a tale of global reach - from Houston to Washington, from Bombay to London, from Munich to Sao Paolo - laying out the unbelievable scenes that twisted together to create this shocking true story." Eichenwald reveals never-disclosed details of a story that features a cast including George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Paul O'Neill, Harvey Pitt, Colin Powell, Gray Davis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Alan Greenspan, Ken Lay, Andy Fastow, Jeff Skilling, Bill Clinton, Rupert Murdoch, and Sumner Redstone.

FROM THE CRITICS

Barbara Ley Toffler - The Washington Post

Eichenwald has masterfully depicted the devastating results of that lost love of purposeful work. He also has given us a fine example of what love of the job can produce: a dynamite book. Kurt Eichenwald clearly loves what he does.

Charles R. Morris - The New York Times

Two questions arise: How could financial and investing professionals have been so badly gulled? And behind all the Potemkin-village financial reports, what was actually going on at Enron? The first question may be one for aficionados of mass hallucination, but Kurt Eichenwald's Conspiracy of Fools brilliantly answers the second … Conspiracy of Fools is a splendid achievement. Mr. Eichenwald has an encyclopedic grasp of a watershed business collapse, and has turned it into a gripping read, a true tale for our times.

Newsday

A RIVETING NARRATIVE... Eichenwald, a reporter for The New York Times, is becoming known not just for his strong newspaper reporting, which has won him two Polk Awards, but for turning stories of corporate crime into books that read something like John Grisham novels.

Barron's

MAGNIFICENT... written in the manner of a breezy crypto-thriller and told from the viewpoint of a fly on the wall-or at times, a devil on the shoulders. The style makes gripping reading... readers looking for a fact-filled companion to one of the all-time greatest Ponzi schemes will find everything they're expecting here, along with compelling prose and remarkable insights.

Booklist