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Customer Reviews:Average Customer Rating: Irrational Hubris The pleasure and enlightenment I derived from reading "A Colossal Failure of Common Sense" is in a class of its own. I am not employed in the financial sector and although I am a daily reader of the WSJ, I never fully grasped the fundamentals of the underlying financial "house of cards" created by the CDO and CDS instruments until I read this book. I have reached a point in my life where I only read non-fiction as I find it more enjoyable - and enlightening - than fiction. This book was more entertaining and could easily stand up to the many novels I have read in the past, written by authors including Frederick Forsythe, Robert Ludlum, Ken Follett, John Grisham, David Baldacci, Leon Uris and James Clavell. In my opinion, Mr. MacDonald is in pretty good company, especially considering that finance and entrepreneurship, not writing, are his primary talents. As works of business non-fiction go, I place this this book in the same league as Kurt Eichenwald's "Conspiracy of Fools" for an excellent narrative of business folly. As far as a Wall Street thriller, the only book that even comes close to "Colossal Failure" is James Stewart's "Den of Thieves." credibility of the authors sink in first couple of pages.... First, Lehman was certainly not "the greatest" nor the most prestigious investment bank "Wall Street had ever seen"...that is just rubbish. The 2nd thing that quickly stood out on the 1st page or 2nd was incorrect English usage....using "disrespect" as a verb...very low class..why did editors allow this? A sad tale of greed, ambition and hubris These two authors pen a thrilling and well written insider account of Lehman's collapse. Fools abound, villains are tarred and feathered, heroes lauded, tragedies laid bare, strange financial terms and roads to riches revealed and the insider's emotional and psychic catharsis given air. McDonald's subjectivity might have succumbed to a publicized rant except for the deft writing of Robinson who knows how to turn a phrase and lubricate the storyline to bring facts and authority to the reader. Will help ordinary people understand the mess the economy is in This book is fairly easy to follow. It starts out with the authors life and how he ended up at Lehman's. Unlike some of the other reviewers, I thought this part of the book was integral to the rest of the story. It really made the story personal, so that I was right there with the author, through all of his successes and failures. I laughed and cried with him. It was not a dry factual book that is so boring, you can hardly make yourself pick it up. I stayed up half the night to finish it, but finally had to go to bed. Then, I woke up the next morning early, and like a child at Christmas, could not go back to sleep until I finished reading it. As other reviewers have commented, he has interviewed numerous people to get his facts, and his facts are correct!! There is no conjecture here, he has dates time and numbers, all in the correct order. This book will make you run the gamut of emotions, and in the end, you will be terrified that this could have happened in the USA, and you will wonder when (not if, when) this will happen again. NO FREE LUNCH Takes a very complicated subject to a new level of simplicity. There is no free lunch. | | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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