Rating: 
Summary: A must for business/law school case study
Review: Eichenwald was featured in Christopher Lydon's show "The Connection" on NPR on Sep 22, 2000. Obviously a well founded book with excellent implications for the study of ethics by senior corporate management (even if it is "only" price fixing).Highly recommend for academic and personal study.
Rating:
Summary: Great non-fiction
Review: The best thing about this book is that it takes what could have been a dry and mundane translation of facts, and turns it into a suspenseful page-turner. Periodically, events and people are summarized, so you don't get completely lost in what could be an overwhelming barrage of factual information, which, nonetheless, is necessary for the book to be taken seriously. A combination of espionage thriller and treatise on corporate price-fixing, it was almost like getting two books read instead of one.
Rating:
Summary: Fiction? You will wish it were so.
Review: I read hundreds of books in a year, and this work is one of the best I have read in 2000. Kurt Eichenwald deserves an award for getting it through the attorneys and then to publication. Eichenwald, a finalist for the year 2000 Pulitzer and winner of other awards for his writing, has not only taken a riddle, wrapped in mystery, and shrouded by an enigma,(a nod to Winston Churchill) and made it readable, he has created a brilliant book. He created a book that could stand as a work of Fiction and be a novel of excellence, or be true to this bizarre story that strains credibility so many times, and yet he manages to give every bit of credence the reader needs to believe. Mike Wallace of 60 minutes couldn't have dissected this tale with greater skill. And if you think I jest about the novel it would make, if 19th Century is your style, think Wilkie Collins, or if your taste is more contemporary, perhaps Charles Palliser of Quincunx fame. That is the type of labyrinthine thought that would be required to conjure this story from thin air. At the center of the story is what at first seems to be an all-too-common tale. American consumers have gotten a great deal of exposure recently as to how a company can, in the opinion of The Justice Department, be detrimental to the public welfare. I would suggest there are issues that make bureaucratic careers, and issues that are literally participants in the lives of nearly all of us, and they are important. Unless you treat eating as an extreme sport, you probably have not snacked on any software lately, be it Microsoft, or even Apple. However in the case that this book covers, this company is in your favorite restaurant, your house, your kitchen, and before you continue, they are all over what sits on the end of your fork, every meal, of every day. This book involves a company that many will not recognize it is about the people who have appointed their company "Supermarket To The World". Now that level of arrogance just begs the question of who are these people, and how do they operate? Archer Daniels Midland is responsible for many of those ingredients you will find on the label of what you consume. Ingredients like, oilseed products, emulsifiers, etc. They also produce flour for your local pizzeria, and lysine for the folks who raise your food. In addition they can produce political pressure proportionate to a company 50 times their size. And finally they have a Human Resource Department that hired and almost handed the company over to an individual so bizarre, that in his more lucid moments he fancies himself, Whitacre, Mark Whitacre. His delusions of grandeur as a secret agent would be absurd if not for the role he was playing as the critical person in the government's efforts to take down ADM, and some of their partners scattered across 5 continents. In addition to being the world's supermarket, ADM also developed those skills necessary to run illegal businesses on a global scale. An individual chooses to help the FBI gather evidence against the corrupt company he works for, what could be simpler, how many novels have used the same premise? Unfortunately for the 2 agents that put their careers on the line, and spend years of their life working with this person, there was nothing simple, they would have been pleased with complex. These two agents got chaos in its human form, their "informant". All starts well, and then an inconsistency appears, no problem. Later a reported fact was not quite so factual, but whose memory is perfect? But then reality is turned upside down. A lie is a lie, is a lie about a lie a double negative, making it a truth? Do you believe the person, his recorded voice, the memo he wrote, or what he has told his attorney, or surely what he tells the U.S. Government's lawyers, perhaps a judge? And how is it possible for an Author to even attempt to put this episode of The Twilight Zone in to book form? Eichenwald has done so, by creating something that is not your typical read. He breaks with convention without breaking or even bending the truth. As the Author stated, "the reader is deceived into believing fiction through the true recitation of fact.'' Brilliant! Period.
Rating:
Summary: Unbelievable
Review: It is hard to believe that this book is non-fiction. Without a doubt one of the strangest stories to ever grace the business world. Compared to this story, Martha Stewart's tale is mundane and boring. The book's center character is Mark Whitacre. A corporate insider who works with the FBI in a price fixing case against his employer, Archer Daniels Midland Corp. ("Supermarket to the World"). Every blurb on the covers is true. It is a page turner, hard to put down, fascinating, etc. The first two sections (books), are very easy to follow and read. The third section sometimes gets bogged down in details of the in fighting between Justice Department officials on who is going to try the case, but still it is fairly easy to follow if you check the "Cast of Characters" in the first part of the book. I kept this one on my shelf for over a year, figuring that I couldn't keep up with the corporate world of price fixing, trust violations, complex accounting, etc. I was pleasently surprised. It caught me from page one and anyone with a modicum of intelligence will be able to follow the cast, plot twists, details, and investigation with ease. This books ranks with "Barbarians at the Gate", and "A Civil Action", as the best non-fiction "business true-crime" books of the last decade or so. Mark Whitacre has to rank as the weirdest and most unlikely of corporate executives in history and his motives and behavior careen out of control. Their are plenty of lessons to be taught and learned within the pages of this outstanding work for everyone. Especially for those who believe that, due to birth, talent, money, genius, normal rules and law does not apply to them. It surely does and we are left with a sense that these corporate executives, FBI agents, DOJ attorneys, Defense Attorneys, politicians, are no different that the rest of us. They only had the misfortune to believe their own hype. Don't miss this one!!!!
Rating: 
Summary: A script pretending to be a book
Review: This book read like a script for a movie. It consists to a large extent of dialogue interspersed with description such as 'they got out on the xth floor'. It's hard not to get the impression that the script was rejected but somehow managed to find itself a publisher. The author seems to have done little more than string together masses of tape and court proceedings with basic vocabulary. It reads like a newspaper article that has radioactively morphed into more-than-book length. I was frustrated that the story did not stay with the perspective of one person and their understanding of the situation but jumped all over the place. This may work well in a movie where you have visual representations of the different characters, but in book form it created a very superficial story. Also, the relationship between M. Whitacre and his wife, as narrated, seems highly implausible. It would be interesting to read a book written by the wife. Some professional newspaper writers successfully morph into brilliant book writers. Eichenwald is not one of them.
Rating: 
Summary: Passing True Life Drama
Review: This book was hyped by one of its reviewers as comparable to "A Civil Action" by Jonathan Harr. Actually, it is not as good as that book, but it is a generally diverting story about corporate greed and one odd insider's attempt to expose this dirty seam of capitalism. That the main character turns out to be a not-very-likeable fellow who has a problem with believability adds a certain twist to the proceedings, but the story has so many skeins and personalities that it is sometimes difficult for the reader to keep all the players and machinations straight. Nonetheless, it is worth the effort and I recommend this book.
Rating:
Summary: Truth is Stranger than Fiction
Review: Corporate espionage, money laundering, greed, and one of the most bizarre whistle-blowing cases the FBI had ever seen. So is the twisted tale told in Kurt Eichenwald's The Informant. And most bizarre of all, its all true. Eichenwald, a senior writer for the New York Times, recalls the events that occurred during the 1990's at the Archer Daniels Midland Company when one of its own executives, Mark Whitacre, became a mole for the FBI. According to Whitacre, the company was working with international competitors to fix prices globally on their products, specifically lysine, a feed additive. Archer Daniels Midland is a Fortune 500 company located in Decatur, Illinois, and was at the time led by its chairman and chief executive officer, Dwayne Andreas, a politically connected millionaire. ADM is one of the world's largest grain producers, boasting that it is the "Supermarket to the World." Among other things, the company supplies many food manufacturers around the world with food additives such as citric acid, lysine, and corn syrup. To maintain large profit margins, however, the company had acquired many corrupt and illegal practices, all to be dissolved by Mark Whitacre. Whitacre began his career at ADM at a relatively young age. With a doctorate in biochemistry, he was the president of the bioproducts division at ADM. Whitacre began his work with the FBI in 1992 when ADM began investigating corporate espionage by a competitor. It was believed that a major Japanese competitor, Ajinomoto, had planted a virus in one of ADM's lysine plants. The virus was believed to be the cause of abnormally low production levels. It was further suspected that the competitor had an employee working undercover at ADM to sabotage the plant. Once the investigation began, however, Whitacre became nervous that he would look suspicious because he spent so much time communicating with the foreign competitors on other matters, including illegal price fixing. He was scared that he would be fingered as a suspect. Because of this fear, and others to be disclosed later, Whitacre broke down and told the FBI of the illegal deals going on at the company. The FBI was curious from the beginning however as to why such a highly paid executive would be willing to cooperate with the FBI to bring down such a major conspiracy. However, they were thrilled and anxious to begin work with Whitacre; it was rare to have such a prominent member of a company working as an informant to the FBI. Whitacre agreed to work with the FBI so long as he was granted immunity. The FBI in turn agreed, so long as Whitacre agreed to be honest and disclose any and all wrong doing that he was aware of at ADM and cooperate with the FBI to document the crimes. It seemed like a relatively simple plan, but nothing in this case would ever be simple...
|
