|
||||||||
Better Together
Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought
The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch  (436)
$13.17
|
Disconnected: Deceit and Betrayal at WorldCom by Lynne W. Jeter  (16)
$11.53
|
Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (139)
$11.99
|
Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron by Bethany McLean (127)
|
The Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash by Charles R. Morris  (46)
$15.61
|
In Cooper's thorough and efficient narrative about the fantastic collapse of telecommunications giant WorldCom there are two distinct themes: her insider's view of the corporation's widespread wrongdoing and the life experiences that led Cooper to becoming a courageous whistleblower. Cooper, former vice president of WorldCom's internal audit department, is most successful with the former. She brings us into the boardrooms, the backrooms and, somehow, into the heads of key players as some struggled with and others embraced the deceptions that would bring WorldCom down. Less engaging are Cooper's autobiographical anecdotes, which offer everything from her high school math scores to clichéd advice from Mom and Dad ("when you are unkind, you can't go back and change the hurt"). Other unnecessary personal details-like the fact that 12-year-old Cooper called her violin teachers first when she was moving away-and mundane meanderings about haircuts and gender differences take the reader off course. Too, many of these folksy anecdotes paint the author as a goody two-shoes. Cooper is better and trumps other WorldCom accounts with a perspective available only from a business-smart insider with a conscience.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Review
"Extraordinary Circumstances details the struggle to get management to take internal audit seriously. The story of the investigation comes to life through Cynthia's words. I found myself drawn into the story. Congratulations, Cynthia, on a successful first book. And many thanks for being willing to stand up to the truth and fight to expose the WorldCom fraud." (bloggingstocks.com, 4/3/08)
"Cooper's story is personal and interesting…it's a cautionary tale for corporate executives. The book is an interesting story of how Cooper ended up as a major player in a very important business story." (TexaxLawyer.com, 3/31/08)
"Extraordinary Circumstances is a must read for anyone who wants to understand the dynamics of an accounting fraud. It tells the story of how that fraud was uncovered and of the ugly manipulation and deceit she encountered along the way." (Bloomberg.com, 2/28/08)
"…blow-by-blow detail is what makes Cooper's "Extraordinary Circumstances" well worth reading. Cooper's willingness to reveal her innermost thoughts as she dug makes for gripping reading." (BusinessWeek, February 25, 2008)
"...with the publication of her new book, Extraordinary Circumstances: The Journey of A Corporate Whistleblower, we finally get an inside account of what really happened at WorldCom. It's a powerful tale. Cooper's story has been partially told before, most notably in the Wall Street Journal and in a report prepared for WorldCom's board of directors. But her adventures at WorldCom come to life in this first-person account." (USA Today, February 15, 2008)
"Readers of Cooper's book, Extraordinary Circumstances: The Journey of a Corporate Whistleblower, will find it easy to identify with both the employees who manipulated the telecommunications giant's financial statements and those who caught them." (Reuters.com, February 7, 2008)
"...it's a fascinating study of the quantum changes in character that accompany the accumulation of unimaginable wealth as well as an uncomfortable reminder of how, faced with an ethical fork in the road, just how easy it is for some to take a wrong turn." (WebCPA.com, February 2008)
"This is a heroic, often exciting tale of a person who, in the course of doing her job, stumbles on a big lie and pushes on to get to the bottom of it." (CFO.com; 1/25/08)
See all Editorial Reviews
Product Details
|