Rating: 
Summary: More than an business book -- an adventure story
Review: I'm not a banker or a lawyer, but I love a good adventure and I found it in 24 Days. 24 Days tells the story of the two reporters who uncovered all of Enron's lies in a totally readable, exciting way. You end up not only getting (and being shocked by) the crazy maze of lies and double-dealing at Enron, you get to know each of the dastardly dudes who master-minded the whole mess and who are to this day pretending not to know or remember a thing. Meanwhile, thousands of people's hard-earned life-savings have gone down the drain and, in a way, into the pockets of Ken Lay, Jeff Skilling and Andy Fastow. Read 24 Days, it's a good read on its own, and when the bad guys finally go down, you'll know who's who and why. P.S. If you want to find out how much Enron had to do with the California power crisis, read Chapter 36.
Rating:
Summary: Great Corporate Mystery
Review: If you want to understand the Enron disaster while reading a detective story, this is your book. You learn the secrets of Enron's financial dirty tricks while watching these two Wall Street Journal reporters uncover the story. It's fascinating and a great read.
Rating: 
Summary: Not All the President's Men
Review: Interesting if you're a corporate PR flack and would like to know how top flight reporters think and how not to pique their curiosity. These reporters did play a crucial role, which should not be minimized, but if you've been following the story since they first broke it, there won't be much new to you in here. Rebecca Smith also comes across as incredibly tightly wound.
Rating:
Summary: Financial Investigative Reporting at Its Best!
Review: One of my all-time favorite nonfiction books is All the President's Men, which portrays the unfolding of the Watergate Scandal as unveiled by Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward. It never occurred to me to think that there could be a riveting book about uncovering business scandals, and 24 Days happily exceeded my highest expectations. As a management consultant, I once visited Enron to discuss the possibility of taking on an assignment for them. While there, I was baffled by the supreme self-confidence that the executives displayed that nothing could possibly go wrong. The only other time I had run into self-confidence that great was with a computer game company just a few months before its business evaporated and it filed for bankruptcy. I should have realized that that precedent was a portent. I never could understand where all of the Enron earnings came from. It seemed impossible that the trading operations could have been that profitable, and everyone knew that the company had overpaid for almost all of its utility operations. I never suspected, though, that the whole thing was a charade based on corrupt accounting. I admire the authors for helping peck that facade apart to reveal the underlying house of cards. Before considering this book, let me remind you of a few things. First, how much do you really want to know about Enron? The story was well covered in the press and on television. I read almost all of the Wall Street Journal stories at the time, so reading the same material again didn't add much for me. Second, do you really like to understand the intricacies of accounting rules? Much of what Enron was doing will be hard to understand unless you are pretty competent in accounting and like to appreciate the finer points. Third, are you willing to wait to the end of the book before you understand the nature of the Enron illegal actions? The exposition style captures the process of unraveling the mysteries in historical sequence. If you decide want to learn all you can, then this book is for you. If not, you might just look up an article that summarizes the fraud. As for me, I didn't really want to know any more about Enron. But I did want to know how the story was developed by the Wall Street Journal. I was particularly impressed by how many people offered valuable information to the reporters after they began raising questions in their articles. Otherwise, Enron would probably still be operating. In addition, I was fascinated by the ways that Enron typically answered the reporters' questions in misleading ways (or actually lied). You would have had to assume that someone was doing that on purpose to have been adequately paranoid to have kept plugging away. Ultimately, the big eye-opener for me was that so much of the Enron fraud had been disclosed to the SEC in public documents. Neither regulators, nor security analysts, nor portfolio managers, nor journalists nor competitors spotted that anything was wrong until after Enron's CEO, Jeffrey Skilling, unexpectedly resigned. Clearly, the theory about the efficiency of financial markets wasn't right in the case of Enron. Let the investor beware! I came away from reading the book convinced that there are other public companies out there hiding losses and debt in off-balance sheet transactions that are not fully disclosed. Whenever I cannot see where the profits are coming from in the future, I won't buy a stock. That was the key lesson for me. I would like to congratulate Ms. Rebecca Smith and Mr. John Emshwiller on having done a wonderful journalistic job with the story for the Wall Street Journal, and in providing this book as a guide for future generations of financial journalists. After you finish enjoying this fine journalistic story, think about where else the public representations may not be what they seem to be. Be skeptical!
Rating:
Summary: A Non-Fiction Horror Story
Review: Or: A well-told morality tale. The good guys (the authors) get their story, the bad guys (Lay, Skilling, Fastow, et al.) are caught, exposed and maybe, they will be punished some day. Actually, Smith and Emshwiller (they agreed to determine the order of their names by a coin-toss - at the insistence of guess which author?) do a good job of humanizing this undeniably corrupt and unsavory crew and show how "the system" allows for, and even encourages such large-scale malfeasance. The book is hard to put down and (even after three years of George W. Bush - an old Enron-crony, by the way), its revelations about what goes on in U.S. corporations are shocking. Some of the typos and other errors (e.g., "a criteria," p. 10) are surprising in a book by a major publisher.
Rating: 
Summary: Disappointing
Review: Readers who believed the publisher's hype and expected another fast-paced sophisticated thriller along the lines of All the President's Men or Indecent Exposure are going to be disappointed. The machinations that produced Enron, though deeply disturbing, are nevertheless dry and lacking in drama. Since the authors really have no significant new revelations, what we get is a self-serving book that--as indicated in the title--tries hard but fails to convey a "Woodstein"-type aura. Power Failure is a much better and more interesting book. This one simply fails to generate enough, pardon the expression, wattage. The writing is lackluster and book is simply not a very good read.
Rating:
Summary: Stick to your knitting
Review: The authors, both Wall Street Journal beat reporters, found themselves in the middle of the paper's coverage of the demise of Enron at the end of 2001. They do an admirable job of retelling the story of Enron's 24 day death spiral - from October 16, 2002 when Enron announced big losses associated with two partnerships to December 3rd when Enron filed for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy. If you missed any of the daily installments in this big-business soap opera, this work will fill in most of the gaps. There's also the story of what it's like to cover a big on-going economic event for the nation's leading business daily. The Journal's reporters can be confident that media sensitive business people are going to respond to their calls first. However, the writers give the impression that they were pretty much on their own after that and that all the Journal editors in New York do is decide on how much space to devote to each article. I had two complaints about this otherwise solid book. First, after 381 pages, I'm still not sure how the villainous partnerships worked. The authors spent lots of time in 2001 trying to figure them out. It would have been nice if they had used this book to tell in a clear way what they discovered. How were they set up? How did they enrich Enron employees and how did they contribute to Enron's destruction? The second complaint comes form the author's attempt to personalize their coverage. Each time I read about their gulps of coffee in the morning and hints of bad feeling between the two of them I cringed. Smith and Emshwiller are solid business reporters - they and we would be better served if they stuck to their knitting.
Rating:
Summary: Not a Perfect Book, but ...
Review: This adds to our understanding of Enron's collapse, and of broader matters, including the wary symbiosis between the financial press and the short sellers. Short sellers, stock traders who in effect bet that a certain stock will fall within a given time frame, are important to reporters because they make their money searching for weak targets, like lions looking for the weakest wildebeest in the herd. The weakness is newsworthy. On the other hand, short sellers may benefit by spreading false rumors as well. Maybe nothing is rotten in the corporation of Denmark, Inc., but the rumors that something is will still drive down its price! In sum: short sellers can be a source of information or of misinformation to financial reporters. This book captures that situation, portraying one of its authors as more receptive to such sources and the other as more wary.
Rating:
Summary: Great summary from the newswire's angle...
Review: This book gives a very clear description of "who knew what, when," or "who told what, when." The authors convey the excitement of trying to develop contacts within Enron and Arthur Andersen, and how they had to protect their sources. They describe in detail how they broke the story, and how, in 24 days, Enron and Anderson both imploded. I remember reading the original Wall Street Journal articles and being amazed at how the reporters covered the company, even after the media feeding frenzy began three weeks into the implosion. I agree with other reviewers who say the accounting schemes needed to be explained better. Basically, one needs to know the relationship between a company's balance sheet and cash flow statement. With that, the reader can understand how Enron tried to off-load its liabilities (from the balance sheet) and used Special Purpose Entities (such as LJM, LJM2, and the Raptors, which Enron funded) to inflate their income. The Special Purpose Entities themselves "paid" for the Enron assets with stock that Enron supplied to the Special Purpose Entities (without charging Balance sheet "Equity.") Get it? The house of cards was OK until Enron stock began falling. The story ends in 2003, and there have been a lot of developments since then. Nevertheless, this is an exciting story.
Rating:
Summary: Insightful and Disturbing
Review: This book gives a very clear description of "who knew what, when," or "who told what, when." The authors convey the excitement of trying to develop contacts within Enron and Arthur Andersen, and how they had to protect their sources. They describe in detail how they broke the story, and how, in 24 days, Enron and Anderson both imploded. I remember reading the original Wall Street Journal articles and being amazed at how the reporters covered the company, even after the media feeding frenzy began three weeks into the implosion. I agree with other reviewers who say the accounting schemes needed to be explained better. Basically, one needs to know the relationship between a company's balance sheet and cash flow statement. With that, the reader can understand how Enron tried to off-load its liabilities (from the balance sheet) and used Special Purpose Entities (such as LJM, LJM2, and the Raptors, which Enron funded) to inflate their income. The Special Purpose Entities themselves "paid" for the Enron assets with stock that Enron supplied to the Special Purpose Entities (without charging Balance sheet "Equity.") Get it? The house of cards was OK until Enron stock began falling. The story ends in 2003, and there have been a lot of developments since then. Nevertheless, this is an exciting story.
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