Sunday, March 21, 2010

Five best books about scandals

Henry E. Scott's Shocking True Story: The Rise and Fall of Confidential, "America's Scandalous Scandal Magazine" was recently published by Pantheon.

He named his five favorite books on scandals for the Wall Street Journal. One book on the list:
The Informant
by Kurt Eichenwald

More than 5,000 book titles on Amazon include the word "scandal"—that says a lot about the theme's drawing power, but some of the best books on the subject are more subtly titled. Kurt Eichenwald's "The Informant" is a classic of corporate-scandal reportage, dissecting the 1990s price-fixing conspiracy by Archer Daniels Midland and overseas agricultural companies. The book reads like a John Grisham thriller as Eichenwald weaves the improbable story of Mark Whitacre, an ADM executive who became the FBI's secret source—and who turned out to be crooked, too. Who knew that a complex tale about an international plot to rig the prices of an animal-feed additive called lysine could be almost impossible to put down?
Read about another book on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue