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| Cover shown is paperback edition |
| PIPE DREAMS Greed, Ego, and the Death of Enron Robert Bryce Molly Ivins (Fwd.) New York: PublicAffairs, 2002 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN 1-58548-138-X | 394pp. | HC/BWI | $27.50 | |
| Page 1: | "But she was there anyway, eleven days before Christmas 2001, tiny beads of sweat forming on her forehead as she walked the long, wide curving concourse at Enron Field." |
| Missing comma: S/B "the long, wide, curving concourse". |
| Page 9: | "In the end, a severe cash crunch sank Enron, case closed." |
| Poor sentence construction: S/B "Enron. Case closed". |
| Page 9: | "He drank beer. I drank Sprite." |
| Aha — product placement!. <g> |
| Page 11: | "These options were going to make everyone at the company rich, that is, if Enron could just keep impressing Wall Street with big profits." |
| Poor use of first comma: S/B "rich — that is, if" or something similar. The separation needs more emphasis. |
| Page 13: | "In the 1980s, multimillionaire Dallas oilman Nelson Baker Hunt, who, having far more money than sense, got greedy and tried to corner the world silver market." |
| Extra word: S/B "Nelson Baker Hunt, having". |
| Page 32: | "InterNorth's stock cratered when the deal was announced, falling about 10 percent." |
| This is hyperbole. But it is typical of the language used in reporting stock market trends. Compare this: "Sayonara Airlines said its flight to Myanmar cratered today over the Pacific, losing 10 percent of its altitude before recovering. (Film at 11)" |
| Page 41: | "If that had happened, Enron's trading parties would have asked the company to put up tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in cash..." |
| This phrase, I believe, S/B "trading partners". |
| Page 47: | "Beaver Creek, which at that time, was still a fairly new resort in the Colorado Rockies, was the location." |
| Extra comma: S/B "which at that time was still a fairly new resort". |
| Page 53: | "The 1984 ruling, known as FERC Order 380, hit the pipelines hard because they were stuck with dozens of these suddenly very expensive take-or-pay gas contracts. In 1985, the FERC, with Order 436, said that anybody who wanted to use interstate pipelines to transport gas could do so and that the pipeline companies had to provide this service at a federally approved price, and that even though they might be losing money, the pipeliners had to like it. It took two more years for the FERC to create Order 500, which presented a financial methodology through which the pipeline companies could negotiate partial recovery of the costs of their take-or-pay contracts." |
| What about FERC Order 636, known as the Restructuring Rule, passed in 1992? It required interstate pipeline companies to unbundle their sales operations from transportation services. |
| Page 55: | " 'He was still at McKinsey. then. It was his concept. It made a major mark.' " |
| Extra period: S/B "McKinsey then" or "McKinsey, then". |
| Page 63: | "If a company needs extra revenues, an (unscrupulous, or perhaps 'creative') accountant can simply 'move the curve' ..." |
| Misplaced parenthesis and comma: S/B "unscrupulous (or perhaps 'creative')". |
| Page 77: | "Nearly a decade later, construction was still underway and the contract was worth $250 million." |
| S/B "under way". |
| Page 88: | "Although the Elder Bush lost the 1992 election to Bill Clinton, Lay didn't disown the Bushes." |
| Capitalization: S/B "elder Bush". |
| Page 91: | "Why? At the time Bush met with him, Charls E. Walker was an Enron board member..." |
| The unusual spelling is correct. Walker, a former Deputy Secretary of the Treasury, is the brother of Ken Lay's mentor Pinkney Walker. |
| Page 155: | Chapter title: "22 LJM1". |
| The only place in the book where numeral "1" does not look like a Capital-I. |
| Page 176: | "" 'Alright, alright, enough,' snapped Lay..." |
| Many would question the need to misspell "all right" this way. But it does work to convey a sense of Lay's impatience. |
| Page 183: | "... a small set of islands called the Falklands, or Las Malvinas, to the Argentinians." |
| Extra comma: S/B "or Las Malvinas to the Argentinians". |
| Page 216: | "Enron's massive new edifice to itself, a forty-story, 1.2-million-square-foot building was going to be a monument to trading." |
| Missing comma: S/B "building, was". (Also, it appears there's a meaning of "edifice" I don't know.) |
| Page 217: | "There were hundreds of traders, lined up in banks of computer screens, keyboards, telephones, and adrenaline." |
| Banks of adrenaline? I think not. |
| Page 219: | "Furthermore, its had a battalion of traders who were among the sharpest in the business." |
| Typo: S/B "it had". |
| Page 221: | "But Enron had hundreds of traders. Some going long, others going short in gas and dozens of other commodities." |
| Sentence construction: S/B "But Enron had hundreds of traders, some going long, others going short, in gas and dozens of other commodities." |
| Page 224: | "...a move that helped Fastow's boss, Jeff Skilling look better." |
| Missing comma: S/B "Jeff Skilling, look better". |
| Page 233: | "But by the late 1990s, when Enron began barricading doorways that standard had been irreparably eroded..." |
| Missing comma: S/B "when Enron began barricading doorways, that standard". |
| Page 259: | "...the planes were stocked with specific types of low-fat cheese imported, of course from France." |
| Missing M-dash and comma: S/B "cheese—imported, of course, from France". |
| Page 324: | "And like the other awards, Lay almost surely had an ulterior motive." |
| Wrong word: S/B "as with". Lay proved to be no prize. |
| Page 333: | "And there was no one like Muckleroy to the ride to the rescue." |
| Extra word: S/B "to ride to the rescue". |
| Page 358: | "Laura Unger, the former acting chairman of the SEC, has said the agency could use as much as $1 billion per year to handle the hundreds of investigations it currently has underway." |
| S/B "under way". |
| Page 367: | Note 4 for Chapter 14: "Cheney led Cheney led Halliburton to Feast at Federal Trough". |
| Repeated words in title of reference |
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