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