The Last Tycoons
Author
William D. Cohan, as of 2013 an author of three New York Times best-selling books about Wall Street, is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, and a former award-winning investigative newspaper reporter based in Raleigh, North Carolina. He worked on Wall Street for seventeen years. He spent six years at Lazard Frères in New York, then Merrill Lynch, and later became a managing director at JP Morgan Chase.
Chapters
- Great Men
- Tomorrow, the Lazard House Will Go Down
- Original Sin
- You Are Dealing with Greed and Power
- Felix the Fixer
- The Savior of New York
- The Sun King
- Felix for President
- The Cancer is Greed
- The Vicar
- The Boy Wonder
- The Franchise
- Felix Loses It
- It's a White Man's World
- The Heir Apparent
- All the Responsibility but None of the Authority
- He Lit up a Humongous Cigar and Puffed it in our Faces for Half an Hour
- Lazard May Go Down Like the Titanic
- Bid-'em-up Bruce
- Civil War
- The End of a Dynasty
Review
Richard Parker reviewed The Last Tycoons for The New York Times with a mixed assessment, stating the book told an interesting story but at some 700 pages was perhaps overlong:
- ...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 its own way. In fact, “The Last Tycoons” bears a striking resemblance to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon. Fitzgerald set his novel in Hollywood, and described lives, temperaments and ambitions that closely approximate those of Lazard’s most important figures.
