Enron end run: whistleblower Sherron Watkins's tell-all doesn't quite add up.

• Author: Lavelle, Marianne
• Position: Book Review

POWER FAILURE: The Inside Story of the Collapse of Enron by Mimi Swartz, with Sherron Watkins Doubleday, $26.00

THE MOST EXCRUCIATING MOMENTS in Power Failure: The Inside Story of the Collapse of Enron, involve a humiliating salsa-making class and a heart-pounding cross-country ski trek one bitter cold Aspen night. Yes, behind the bad investments, the complex hedging vehicles, and the conflicts of interest that sunk the energy trading behemoth lay these curious scenes of rich executives at play. Nasty, malicious play.

Power Failure is the long-awaited portrait of the company's unraveling through the eyes of Sherron Watkins, the renowned Enron whistleblower, written by award-winning Texas Monthly journalist Mimi Swartz. We get a sense of Watkins as a woman apart from her colleagues early on in the story; when she recounts the seemingly trivial recreational activities planned at company management conferences. As it turns out, careers at Enron rose and fell on petty considerations such as the choice between fly fishing or tennis as an afternoon social activity. It wasn't always easy to navigate the shoals between winnerdom and loserdom; how was Watkins to know that three hefty guys from Enron's old, out-of-favor natural-gas pipeline division would show up for the same salsa-making class she had signed up for? Soon-to-be chief executive Jeff Skilling pokes his nose in the door, as if smelling something bad, and retreats after letting Watkins know that he's seen her.

Then there was the trauma on a snowy trail after dark during an Enron business trip in Colorado. The book contains a priceless photo from this weekend, of Watkins, Skilling, and Andrew Fastow, chief financial officer and schemer, decked out in sunglasses and ski suits, with the majestic Rockies rising behind them. But their smiles of camaraderie belie tension in the mountain air. Fastow and another executive race ahead and leave Watkins behind, alone and inadequately clad for the cold, on a cross-country ski trek across a desolate field to a fancy restaurant. Watkins briefly frets that she will become "the first person in Enron history to succumb to perk death."

Imagine a corporation run by the meanest kids from high school. The ones who were able to claw, cheat, or charm their way to the top of the class, as long as it was a relatively average class. For all its talk of "Enron smart," the company never attracted the cream of the crop from the Ivy Leagues; its business was too...