Book Notes

Book Notes

“Enron: Corporate Fiascos and Their Implications”
Edited by Bala Dharan and Nancy Rapoport
Published by Foundation Press

On the cover of this new collection of essays by leading scholars and experts in the corporate and legal fields, Enron is depicted as the Titanic headed for an iceberg labeled “Hubris” and threatened by ominous dark clouds of stock options, conflicts of interest, hidden debt and self dealing. Bala Dharan, the J. Howard Creekmore Professor of Accounting at Rice’s Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Management, and Nancy Rapoport of the University of Houston Law Center present the Enron scandal as the quintessential case study of corporate greed.

While other books have focused on the personalities involved, this text examines the causes and consequences of Enron’s failure from business, financial, legal and ethical viewpoints. Essays from more than 30 experts include contributions by Duane Windsor, the Lynette S. Autry professor of management at the Jones School; Steven Wilson, who received his bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate at Rice; and John C. Coffee Jr., a corporate finance and securities regulation expert from Columbia University.

“Modernism’s Masculine Subjects: Matisse, The New York School and Post-Painterly Abstraction”
By Marcia Brennan
Published by The MIT Press

In the postwar years, society pressured men to conform to well-established roles such as the “Man in the Gray Flannel Suit,” even as the culture also cherished seemingly antithetical notions of male vitality and freedom. In this study, Marcia Brennan, assistant professor of art history, examines the ways in which the modernist paintings of Henri Matisse, the New York School abstract expressionists and the post-painterly abstractionists emerged as powerful metaphors of these conflicted conceptions of masculine selfhood.

Making new use of writings by influential critics of the period, Brennan rejects the idea that formalism had an exclusive investment in promoting essentialized and purified conceptions of abstraction and subjectivity, or that this critical discourse was disengaged from issues of gender and embodiment. Rather, this book focuses on the historically compelling interrelationships that played out between these themes. Michael Leja of the University of Delaware said, “With imagination, intelligence and tenacity, Brennan situates postwar modernism within a compelling cultural history.”

“Book Notes” is a column featuring academic books written or edited by Rice University faculty. To submit information on recently or soon-to-be-published books for inclusion in “Book Notes,” send the name of the author and publisher, the publication date and a brief description of the book to Margot Dimond, Office of News and Media Relations, MS 300 or <mdimond@rice.edu>.