Bethany McLean Audiobooks

The Smartest Guys in the Room, by the reporter who asked how Enron made its money

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Who is Bethany McLean?

Bethany McLean, born in 1970, is an American journalist and a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, and one of the sharpest financial reporters of her generation. Her reputation rests on two of the defining business stories of the modern era: the Enron scandal and the 2008 financial crisis – the moments when the money world’s confidence cracked in public.

Before Vanity Fair she spent years at Fortune as a columnist and editor-at-large, and wrote for Slate along the way. It was the Enron story that made her name, and the instinct behind it – follow the numbers, not the applause – has defined her reporting ever since.

Bethany McLean in audiobooks

The title in this catalogue is the one her reputation was built on. The Smartest Guys in the Room sits squarely in her home territory, the Enron scandal, and it is investigative business journalism of a kind that works unexpectedly well in audio. Corporate collapse is, at heart, a story about people – ambition, self-deception and cleverness curdling into catastrophe – and narration gives those characters room to condemn themselves.

No prior knowledge of American energy markets is required, only an appetite for watching hubris meet gravity. This is the story McLean is best known for, at full length and full strength, and in audio it plays like the slowest, most inevitable thriller you will ever enjoy.