POWER FAILURE: THE INSIDE STORY OF THE COLLAPSE OF ENRON (2003)

A certain tone of impregnable, arm's-length admiration is inevitable when a star insider cooperates with a writer's telling of a juicy story. Watkins, the now-famous Enron whistle-blower (and one of Time's Persons of the Year), provides Swartz with invaluable information about the Texas big-biz culture in which she prospered throughout the 1990s. And Swartz, an executive editor at Texas Monthly, describes the players and their plays with the kind of colorful, movie-treatment narrative style so popular in today's business-stories-as-Greek-dramas. What's missing, though, is a more independent writer's portrait of Watkins herself, who is surely a more complex woman and business executive, operating in a good old boys' rodeo, than she's allowed to be in this collaboration.

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