Book Review: Dangerous Pursuits: Mergers and Acquisitions in the Age of Wall Street

• Published date: 01 December 1991
• DOI: 10.1177/0003603X9103600409
• Date: 01 December 1991
• Subject Matter: Book Review

The Antitrust Bulletin/Winter 1991

Dangerous Pursuits: Mergers and

Acquisitions in the

Age

of

Wall Street

Walter

Adams

and James

W.

Brock

New

York:

Pantheon

Books

(1989),209 pp., $19.95.

Reviewed by William J. Curran III, Esq.

979

In Dangerous Pursuits our brave authors dared to descend the

academy's high tower to search the decade of the eighties for cap-

italism only to find its remains. Remarkably, they detected faint

life-amid

the ruin and rubble of merger battles, mega-raids and

corporate

buyouts-to

which they applied their healing economic

arts and saved capitalism. Our authors would save capitalism for

Camelot-purging

it of rogues, raiders and financial double deal-

ers-and

would revive its once grand stature.

Our authors mock the decade past as the dark decade of the

Wall

Street

"deal,"

but we hear only sarcasm

that

"fume[s]

...

[their] little hearts."l Why don't the two unsheathe mighty

swords of logic and reason and fell money and greed? Are not

these Arthurian men "master[s] of [their] fate?"2 Our knights'

righteous crusade from Wall Street to boardroom becomes futile:

their scholarly integrity cannot defeat greed and lust; their eco-

nomic principles cannot subdue raiders and rogues.

ALFRED

TENNYSON,

Idylls

of

the King (Guinevere 627) in

THE

POETIC AND DRAMATIC WORKS OF ALFRED

LoRD

TENNYSON (Student's Cam-

bridge Edition 1898) at 42 [hereinafter

WORKS].

2

Id.at337.

e1992 by Federal Legal Publications, Inc.