[3] William D. Cohan, as of 2013 an author of three New York Times best-selling books about Wall Street, is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, and a former award-winning investigative newspaper reporter based in Raleigh, North Carolina.

He spent six years at Lazard Frères in New York, then Merrill Lynch, and later became a managing director at JP Morgan Chase.

Moreover, in dollar terms, Lazard — however dimmed its reputation — is seemingly thriving as never before, its stock price having doubled in the past two years.

But Cohan’s portrayal of the firm’s dominant partners — whose gargantuan appetites and mercurial habits provide the unifying force behind the book’s operatic melodramas — makes this an epic in its own way.

After 700 pages, many will come away feeling the bank’s story might work better as a tale told by Hollywood — a French-accented “Dynasty” meets “What Makes Sammy Run?”—The New York Times[5]