The Number: How the Drive for Quarterly Earnings Corrupted Wall Street and Corporate America » (Reprint)

As a reporter for The New York Times, Alex Berenson has covered topics ranging from the occupation of Iraq to the flooding of New Orleans to the travails of the pharmaceutical industry. His novel The Faithful Spy won the 2007 Edgar Award for best first novel. A 1994 graduate of Yale University with degrees in history and Economics.

In this commanding big-picture analysis of what went wrong in corporate America, Alex Berenson, a top financial investigative reporter for The New York Times, examines the common thread connecting Enron, Worldcom, Halliburton, Computer Associates, Tyco, and other recent corporate scandals: the cult of the number.

The Washington Post

Alex Berenson, a whip-smart New York Times business reporter, is the wisecracking play-by-play commentator. In The Number, he offers a compelling account of how many large-number corporations went astray in the late 1990s. — Daniel Gross