The Last Tycoons

The Last Tycoons: The Secret History of Lazard Frères & Co.

Hardcover edition
Author	William D. Cohan
Country	United States
Language	English
Subject	Corporate History, Finance, Investment banking
Publisher	Doubleday
Publication date	April 3, 2007
Media type	Print (hardback)
Pages	752 pp.
ISBN	0385514514
Followed by	House of Cards

The Last Tycoons: The Secret History of Lazard Frères & Co. is the debut book by William D. Cohan. It was released on April 3, 2007 by Doubleday.^[1] It focuses on the history of the prominent investment bank Lazard Frères.^[2] The book won the 2007 Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award.^[3]

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 & Co., and later became a managing director at JP Morgan Chase.

Content

1. Great Men
2. Tomorrow, the Lazard House Will Go Down
3. Original Sin
4. You Are Dealing with Greed and Power
5. Felix the Fixer
6. The Savior of New York
7. The Sun King
8. Felix for President
9. The Cancer is Greed
10. The Vicar
11. The Boy Wonder
12. The Franchise
13. Felix Loses It
14. It's a White Man's World
15. The Heir Apparent
16. All the Responsibility but None of the Authority
17. He Lit up a Humongous Cigar and Puffed it in our Faces for Half an Hour
18. Lazard May Go Down Like the Titanic
19. Bid-'em-up Bruce
20. Civil War
21. The End of a Dynasty^[4]

Review

Cohan, who once worked at Lazard, tells a sprawling, gossip-filled tale about the firm, the careful cultivation of its lustrous reputation and, in the last decade or so, that reputation’s apparent undoing. It is far from an epic tragedy — the story is, after all, about money and its most avid pursuers. Moreover, in dollar terms, Lazard — however dimmed its reputation — is seemingly thriving as never before, its stock price having doubled in the past two years. But 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 “Last Tycoon.” Fitzgerald set his novel in Hollywood, and described lives, temperaments and ambitions that closely approximate those of Lazard’s most important figures. Of course, Cohan isn’t Fitzgerald. After 700 pages, many will come away feeling the bank’s story might work better as a tale told by Hollywood — a French-accented “Dynasty” meets “What Makes Sammy Run?”

—The New York Times^[5]

See also

• Blue Blood and Mutiny, a book about another prominent investment bank, Morgan Stanley.
• The Great Game: The Emergence of Wall Street as a World Power: 1653–2000

References

1. The Last Tycoons: The Secret History of Lazard Frères & Co. by William D. Cohan at Goodreads.com
2. Piercing The Lazard Mystique
3. "Business Book of the Year 2007". Financial Times. 25 October 2007. Retrieved 30 May 2012.
4. Thursday, February 26, 2009 The Secret History of Lazard Frères & Co.
5. PARKER, RICHARD (May 27, 2007). "Bankers Behaving Badly". nytimes.com. Retrieved 2015-07-23.

External links

• Book Review - "The Last Tycoons" by William D. Cohan on YouTube