Bloodsport: When Ruthless Dealmakers, Shrewd Ideologues, and Brawling Lawyers Toppled the Corporate Establishment

Warren Zevon’s call to “send lawyers, guns, and money” could be Teitelman’s anthem for the mergers and acquisitions heyday of the mid-1970s and ’80s. Corporate raiders, armed with junk bonds, attorneys, and sheer brio, targeted corporate giants and felled them. It’s a great story, with profound implications for the way America views and regulates corporations. Teitelman shows that corporations were not always regarded as the sole property of shareholders. As recently as the 1960s, courts (and the overall culture) regarded corporations as having multiple stakeholders: management, employees, suppliers, and customers. This view was steadily eroded during takeover battles, as maximizing shareholder value became management’s principal responsibility. Teitelman chronicles this history exhaustively, showing how contemporary social issues, such as the disparity in pay between CEOs and workers and Wall Street’s responsibilities to Main Street, hearken back to this era. Teitelman has a masterly command of his subject, yet he sometimes sacrifices clarity in favor of a jocular, hyperbolic writing style more akin to Rolling Stone than the New Yorker. But this is a minor flaw in this comprehensive look at corporate takeovers. [em]Agent: Carol Franco, Kneerim, Williams, and Bloom. (Apr.) [/em]