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."! 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?"Z

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].

2Id. at 337.

e1992 by Federal Legal Publications. Inc.