Customer Reviews

Tombstones: A Lawyer's Tales from the Takeover Decades

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Having taken an M&A course in law school and heard Larry Lederman tell personal stories of his M&A days, I had to read this book. It was insightful and read like a novel, despite covering large amounts of technical and financial data. Larry covers his beginning days of doing deals at Cravath and later at Wachtell, engineering some of the most novel dealmaking the world has ever seen in the process. Larry's sharp mind and hard work, along with a handful of other New York lawyers and bankers in the 1980s, helped transform the market into what it is today. Recommended read for any M&A lawyer or banker or for someone aspiring to be such.

Excellent read - fun, informative, insightful. Should be great learning tool for those new to the M&A world, and both healthy and entertaining to those who have experience already. Lederman is a very bright guy, and his writing style is that of a fine story-teller. Always clear... always interesting. An "older" book now, but gives interesting fundamentals to foundational strategies still important in 2000. (I just re-read, and am glad I did)

I enjoyed Lederman's writing style and imagine him to be a fairly modest man of extraordinary talent. I hold the CFA designation and my reading choices tend to be finance oriented with an occasional foray into pulp like "Rainmaker", "Predator's Ball", "Liar's Poker", and the other usual suspects. "Tombstones" renewed my appreciation for the legal aspects of M&A, which are introduced here by way of an interesting personal history. Lederman provides an introduction, rather than an exhaustive study, of tax and legal issues. This book drew me in much more than "Big Deal", which I have yet to finish. I recommend both, given Wasserstein's obvious accomplishments and his more contemporary account. "Tombstones" is first and foremost a very good story and thus more engrossing. Also, the lengthy disourse on Ian Reich was heartfelt and of peculiar interest given his reemergence on the front page of the WSJ.

Great book. Hearing the stories from the inside, it'll make you skin crawl to read about the largess of the 1980's. The book covers all the "greats": Keating, Pickens, Reagan and Miklen to name a few. This book would make a great movie.