Barbarians at the Gate
by Bryan Burrough and John Helyar
Mentioned once across 1 show · first heard Oct 2025 on All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg.
The general take
Andrew Ross Sorkin thinks Barbarians at the Gate is a fabulous book that excels because it's character-driven rather than just focusing on events—he groups it with other great financial narratives like Den of Thieves as a model of how to tell stories about this era that really work.
About
#1 New York Times bestseller and arguably the best business narrative ever written, Barbarians at the Gate is the classic account of the fall of RJR Nabisco at the hands of a massive leveraged buyout from investment firm KKR. A book that stormed both the bestseller list and the public imagination, a book that created a genre of its own, and a book that gets at the heart of 1980s Wall Street and the culture it helped define, Barbarians at the Gate is a modern classic—a masterpiece of investigative journalism and a rollicking true story of corporate derring-do and financial swordsmanship. The fight to control RJR Nabisco during October and November of 1988 was more than just the largest corporate takeover in Wall Street history.
Who said what
Andrew Ross Sorkin👍 Recommends
…referencing character-driven books he admired about financial history
“And there's some great books, by the way, about this period. Don't get me wrong. But they didn't have the sort of character-driven story. Like I loved Den of Thieves. I loved Barbarians at the Gate. I loved stories about people. Fabulous books. Fabulous books.”
All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg — 1929 vs 2025: Andrew Ross Sorkin on Crashes, Bubbles & Lessons Learnedat 02:53
Listener reviews
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