Clara’s Verdict
One of the readers on this listing complains that the publisher set the book in minuscule type and warns that you may need reading glasses by the end of it. That complaint is, quite accidentally, the strongest argument for the audiobook I have read in a long time. This is a long, dense, detail-heavy piece of investigative journalism, and twenty hours and nineteen minutes read by Dennis Boutsikaris removes the one genuine physical obstacle standing between a reader and the story.
A correction to the listing first, though. The author field names Bethany McLean alone. The copyright line at the foot of the description reads Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, so the 2003 copyright is in both their names. The undercredit matters, because the reporting here is a two-hander and I would rather Elkind’s half of it did not vanish from the credits. Published by Penguin on 7 January 2021, with a 4.5 average across several thousand ratings.
About the Audiobook
The book begins with a question, and it is one of the great openings in business journalism. Until the spring of 2001, the description says, Enron stood for everything the New Economy promised.
Feared by rivals, worshipped by investors, Enron seemingly could do no wrong. Its profits rose every year; its stock price surged ever upward; its leaders were hailed as visionaries.
Then Bethany McLean, at that point a young writer at Fortune, published an article that asked one plain thing: “how, exactly, does Enron make its money?”
Within a year the company was facing humiliation and the largest bankruptcy in the history of the United States. What the description does with that sequence is the reason the book has long outlasted its news cycle. It does not treat Enron as a story about a handful of criminals. It treats it as a story about a system, one that rewarded top insiders with millions while small investors lost everything, and it makes the harder accusation directly. Enron’s business was an illusion, and Wall Street was willing to accept the illusion even though it knew what the real truth was.
One oddity of the page deserves a mention. The description states that the book has been fully updated for the paperback, which is copy written for a print edition and left in place on an audio listing. It does tell you something useful, namely that the recording is based on a revised text rather than the 2003 original, but it is print copy sitting where audio copy ought to be. The production itself dates from 2021, two decades after the events, which is long enough for the aftermath to form part of the story rather than remain speculation about it.
The Narration
Dennis Boutsikaris is a very good match for this. The register the book needs is journalistic clarity without theatricality, and that is precisely the mode here: precise diction, no editorialising, a steady authority that allows damning material to be damning without anybody underlining it. Enron’s story is full of moments a narrator could ham up, and every one of them lands harder delivered flat.
Twenty hours is where the choice really pays off. Long-form investigative non-fiction carries a specific hazard in audio, which is that the cast list grows enormous and the corporate structures grow complicated, and a reader who cannot differentiate a dozen executives and half a dozen entities loses the listener somewhere in the middle third. Boutsikaris handles large factual casts without resorting to impressions, which is the correct approach for reportage, because the differentiation comes from pacing and emphasis rather than from character voices. My one practical suggestion is to take this in substantial sittings rather than in twenty minute commutes, since the accounting mechanics require you to hold several things in mind at once.
What Readers Say
Two of the three written reviews here were posted in 2007 and 2009, more than a decade before the 2021 audio release, so at least part of that 4.5 average belongs to the book in print rather than to Boutsikaris’s reading of it.
The reviews themselves are unusually good. The 2007 response calls it a great book about a truly remarkable part of economic history before making the complaint about the typesetting, and reassures the reader that they get their value regardless. The 2009 one calls it required reading and a classic, argues that the circumstances of the story are as relevant today as they ever were, and describes the book as excellently written and well researched.
The most recent and most measured is the four star. That reader got through it faster than expected, credits it with explaining in simple terms what the company did to destroy itself, and then registers the observation that gives the book its afterlife, which is that lessons do not seem to have been learnt from the event. They also note that the material is non-technical, exactly the reassurance anyone put off by the accounting needs to hear. Boutsikaris is nowhere in these reviews, so take the average as a verdict on the reporting and sample the performance separately.
Who Should Listen?
Twenty hours is a commitment and this repays it. Anyone interested in how institutions talk themselves into things, how rivals, investors and the financial press all looked at the same company and saw completely different things, or simply how a company can be worth everything on Monday and nothing by Friday, will find this the definitive account. It also works as a masterclass in reporting, since the book’s own origin was a single sceptical question asked by a young magazine writer.
The reservations are modest. If you want a fast-moving corporate thriller, this is a slower and more forensic thing, and its pleasures are in the accumulation rather than in the pace. And if you are coming to it for the accounting specifically, note that one reader praises it precisely for being non-technical: the mechanics are explained in plain language rather than examined in depth, which is a strength for most of us and a limitation for a few.
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