Since its spectacular collapse in 2001, Enron's story has often been held up as a warning of the dangers of excessive corporate greed and ineffective corporate governance. In this new monograph, Benke offers a slightly different perspective, focussing less on the culpability of the specific individuals involved in the scandal (as the majority of other academic and nonacademic texts on the Enron failure have tended to do) and more on what the Enron example can tell us about the complex economic and social changes that took place in late twentieth-century America.

The book itself comprises six separate chapters (in addition to an introduction at the start and a short conclusion at the end), ordered in broadly chronological sequence, that analyse different elements of the rise and fall of Enron. In chapter 1, Benke turns his attentions to Houston – the city in which Enron was headquartered – in order to understand how the unique political economy of the city, with its tradition of influential business elites and its reliance on oil and gas, provided the ideal conditions for an organization like Enron to emerge. Chapter 2 then moves on to situate Enron's business strategy in relation to the wider shifts that were taking place in post-Cold War America relative to understandings of the role of finance and attitudes towards investment more generally. Chapter 3 builds upon these themes by exploring how the twin trends of neoliberalism and deregulation both facilitated and enabled Enron to expand and enter into new markets. In chapter 4 Benke then turns his attention to looking at the various stylistic and visual ways in which Enron sought to promote themselves as an innovative, bold, and daring corporation, operating at the forefront of American capitalism. Chapter 5 then moves the narrative forward by looking at the struggles that Enron experienced in the buildup to its eventual collapse in 2001, focussing in particular on how public perceptions of the firm had already begun to change following the California energy crisis of 2000 and 2001. Finally, chapter 6 brings the analysis to a conclusion by looking at the various ways in which politicians, the media, and the public have sought to make sense of the Enron story in the years after its collapse.

Throughout each of these chapters, Benke does a masterful job in integrating insights from a wide variety of sources, including official reports, internal memos, filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, newspaper articles, court records, official inquiries, and press releases. Taken together, these sources help to produce a rich and multilayered account that does much to shine a light upon the complex social, political, and ideological forces that shaped the context within which the Enron story took place.

This deeper, and more nuanced, reading of the Enron scandal is particularly evident in the sections of the book where Benke turns his attentions to the ways in which Enron executives utilized a distinctive lexicon and visual aesthetic to promote and “sell” their particular brand of financial capitalism to the American public. Equally rich are the sections of the book where Benke deals with the internal culture of Enron and how this culture both aligned with and fed off wider trends in American society at this time.

Overall, then, there is clearly much to commend in Risk and Ruin. Whilst the sections on Enron's business dealings (particularly the sections dealing with the various “special-purposes entities” overseen by Fastow) are likely to be of particular interest to financial and business historians, there is also plenty in this book that will appeal to modern historians and those with an interest in contemporary America more generally. Indeed, in many ways, Benke's book is as much about the ideological and political trends that have shaped (and continue to shape) contemporary American society as it is about the particular failings of Enron. As such, it should find a receptive audience amongst both those with an interest in business history and those with a more general interest in the challenges and contradictions facing American capitalism today.