The Last Tycoons: The Secret History of Lazard Frères & Co.
by William D. Cohan
Why You'll Love This
Lazard Frères ran Wall Street for a century on secrecy and ego alone — until the ego won.
- Great if you want: deep insider access to Wall Street's most secretive, powerful personalities
- The experience: dense and slow-burning — rewards patient readers hungry for texture
- The writing: Cohan writes as a former banker — granular, authoritative, and unapologetically detailed
- Skip if: 752 pages of finance and ego battles tests your patience
About This Book
For over a century, Lazard Frères operated as Wall Street's most enigmatic power center — a firm that shaped governments, brokered fortunes, and cultivated an almost mythological reputation built on secrecy and selective brilliance. William D. Cohan pulls back the curtain on the so-called "Great Men" who ran it, revealing an institution whose outsized influence was matched only by its outsized egos. This is a story about what happens when ambition, discretion, and dynastic pride collide — and why even the most seemingly invincible institutions carry the seeds of their own unraveling.
What distinguishes this book is Cohan's rare double perspective: he spent years as an investment banker himself before becoming a journalist, and that insider fluency shows on every page. The prose is dense but propulsive, reading less like a corporate history and more like a sprawling family drama with billions of dollars as the backdrop. At 752 pages, it demands patience, but rewards it — the depth of reporting, the richness of character, and the granular detail of high-stakes dealmaking make this one of the more immersive portraits of financial power ever committed to print.