The White Sharks of Wall Street: Thomas Mellon Evans and the Original Corporate Raiders (Lisa Drew Books)

Here is the engrossing story of the original corporate raider, Thomas Mellon Evans, who, half a century ago, pioneered a business style that forever changed the American commercial landscape and, ultimately, American life. In The White Sharks of Wall Street, New York Times investigative reporter Diana B. Henriques has crafted a well-researched and entertaining account of this renegade trailblazer, who championed "shareholder rights" and "down-sized" companies, and built "conglomerates," decades before the terms had been coined.

Preferring to call himself a "corporate re-juvenator," Evans often worked without a salary, pealing off assets, eliminating entire layers of middle management, always obsessed with the bottom line. He waged war with unparalleled brilliance, accusing corporate America of forgetting who its real owners were. Henriques writes, "Evans was a man so far ahead of his contemporaries that he had moved into the shadows before the full daylight of his business style had dawned on the rest of Corporate America. At every step of his career, he was barging in where few would follow--at first. But follow they did, at last." Proxy fights, hostile takeovers, tenders and countertenders, greenmail, golden parachutes, poison pills, and shark repellent--it's all here, the deep roots of present-day corporate merger and acquisitions strategy. White Sharks is a compelling and dramatic story of power, greed, ambition, and personal tragedy that illuminates an otherwise obscure period of Wall Street history. --Scott Harrison