About the Author

WILLIAM D. COHAN, a former senior Wall Street investment banker, is the bestselling author of The Last Tycoons and the winner of the 2007 FT/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award. He writes for The Financial Times, Fortune, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Daily Beast, and appears frequently on CNBC.

Reviews

"Engrossing....[Cohan] gives us in these pages a chilling, almost minute-by-minute account of the 10, vertigo-inducing days that one year ago revealed Bear Stearns to be a flimsy house of cards in a perfect storm....He does a deft job of explicating the underlying reasons that put Bear Stearns in peril in the first place....turns complex Wall Street maneuverings into high drama that is gripping -- and almost immediately comprehensible -- to the lay reader....riveting, edge-of-the-seat reading"
--Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times "Cohan vividly documents the mix of arrogance, greed, recklessness, and pettiness that took down the 86 year old brokerage house and then the entire economy. It's a page-turner in the tradition of the 1990 Barbarians at the Gate by Bryan Burrough and John Heylar, offering both a seemingly comprehensive understanding of the business and wide access to insiders....hard to put down, especially thanks to its dishy, often profane, quotes from insiders" --BusinessWeek "Masterfully reported....[Cohan] has turned into one of our most able financial journalists....he deploys not only his hands-on experience of this exotic corner of the financial industry but also a remarkable gift for plain-spoken explanation...the other great strength of this important book is the breadth and skill of the author's interviews...Cohan does a brilliant job of sketching in the eccentric, vulgar, greedy, profane and coarse individuals who ignored all these warnings to their own profit and the ruin of so many others. It's impossible to do justice to his reportorial detail in a brief review..." -- Los Angeles Times "A riveting blow-by-blow account of the days leading up to the government-backed shotgun wedding (to JPM)." -- The Economist "A masterly reconstruction of Bear Stearns implosion--a tumultuous episode in Wall Street history that still reverberates throughout our economy today....meticulous reporting.....first drafts of history don't get much better than this" --Bloomberg

"Engrossing....[Cohan] gives us in these pages a chilling, almost minute-by-minute account of the 10, vertigo-inducing days that one year ago revealed Bear Stearns to be a flimsy house of cards in a perfect storm....He does a deft job of explicating the underlying reasons that put Bear Stearns in peril in the first place....turns complex Wall Street maneuverings into high drama that is gripping — and almost immediately comprehensible — to the lay reader....riveting, edge-of-the-seat reading"
--Michiko Kakutani, "The New York Times"
"Cohan vividly documents the mix of arrogance, greed, recklessness, and pettiness that took down the 86 year old brokerage house and then the entire economy. It's a page-turner in the tradition of the 1990 Barbarians at the Gate by Bryan Burrough and John Heylar, offering both a seemingly comprehensive understanding of the business and wide access to insiders....hard to put down, especially thanks to its dishy, often profane

Praise for the "New York Times" bestseller THE LAST TYCOONS, winner of the Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award "Cohan's portrayal of the firm's dominant partners--whose gargantuan appetites and mercurial habits provide the unifying force behind the book's operatic melodramas-- makes this an epic. . . . In fact," The Last Tycoons" bears a striking resemblance to F. Scott Fitzgerald's" The Last Tycoon,""
"--New York Times Book Review
""Breezy and highly readable. . . . For those of us who enjoy high-level gossip (most people) and an inside look at the machinations, triumphs, failures, and foibles of some of Wall Street's and America's most exalted personages, Cohan's book is entertaining and seductively engrossing."
--"Chicago Tribune"
"Cohan's thoroughness--he interviewed over 100 current and former bankers and assorted bigwigs--unearths a trove of colourful tidbits, many quite racy. . . . Illuminating are Mr. Cohan's descriptions of the scheming, politicking, and general dysfunction that was Lazard."
"--Economist"
"Cohan not only knows where the bodies are buried but got a guided tour of the graveyard."
"--Financial Times
""["The Last Tycoons"] has sent a jolt through Lazard and the rest of Wall Street."
"--Wall Street Journal
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