I reviewed Too Big To Fail – favourably – in the FT today:
For 19 years, the curse of Barbarians at the Gate, Bryan Burrough and John Helyar’s groundbreaking book about the leveraged buy-out of RJR Nabisco, has hung over the publishing industry. Every time there is a tumultuous financial collapse or scandal, journalists scurry to write proposals for books, promising to recount it Barbarians-style.
The finished products are often letdowns, for various reasons. One is that to reproduce the level of human and financial detail in Barbarians – the thoughts that ran through the minds of the executives and bankers as they struggled over the deals, the culture clashes, the petty rivalries – requires an enormous amount of work. When the authors fake it or use shortcuts, it shows.
More important, few stories have the scale and the range of larger-than-life characters – from Henry Kravis of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts to Ross Johnson of RJR Nabisco – of Barbarians. Even events that appear dramatic at the time, such as the collapse of the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management in 1998, lack an enduring grandeur.
With Too Big to Fail, however, Andrew Ross Sorkin has broken the Barbarians curse. Weighing in at 600 pages (and immediately dubbed by cynics “Too Big to Read” or just “Too Big”), Ross Sorkin’s densely detailed and astonishing narrative of the epic financial crisis of 2008 is an extraordinary achievement that will be hard to surpass as the definitive account.
You can read the rest of the review here.
