I am reading another book I found on the sale table at Borders: Conspiracy of Fools by Kurt Eichenwald. It's the story of Enron. It's a huge book, over 700 pages plus a large index. Yet it is as readable as a fiction thriller.  I say "fiction thriller" because in a way this is a "nonfiction thriller".

I admit that  I was a little disappointed at the start to discover that Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling are....human. I wanted them to be monsters. In a way they surely are, but not in the psychopathic way that explains blatant disregard for others so well. Some of the reviewers of this book say that it explains how so many companies got caught up in the breathless 90s. And it does. It explains the accounting practices used and why, and the unwillingness of the top executives to look at what was really going on. It reveals the creativity and brilliance that invented many of the techniques that made Enron rich and later made it fall - men and women of extraordinary ability. I can practically smell the high that floated this team.

I am barely into this huge book but I can see where it's going. What keeps me reading is that it really is written like a novel. We get to know the characters almost as well as we would if Eichenwald had invented them, because of the extensive research and the incredible numbers of interviews he undertook. This book is a big wow.