Written by William D. Cohan - Audio book performed by Alan Sklar - Unabridged Fiction - 3 RETAIL EDITION MP3 COMPACT DISCS - 25 hours

Publisher, Tantor Media (April 2009)

NOTE: RETAIL EDITIONS are packaged in attractive, compact cardboard, jewel-case or DVD shrink-wrapped cases, with full-color art.

ALERT! YOUR CD PLAYER MUST BE MP3 COMPATIBLE! MP3 audiobooks on compact disc can be played on newer CD players that support MP3 technology and accept a 4.75" diameter disc, and on any personal computer that has Microsoft's Media Player or similar software.

Listen to an MP3 audio clip.

In March 2008, Bear Stearns, a swashbuckling eighty-four-year-old financial institution, was forced to sell itself to JPMorgan Chase for an outrageously low price in a deal brokered by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, who was desperately trying to prevent the impending catastrophic market crash. But mere months before, an industry-wide boom had "the Bear" clocking a record high stock price. How did a giant investment bank with $18 billion in cash on hand disappear in a mere ten days? In this tour de force, Cohan provides a minute-by-minute account of the events that brought America's second Gilded Age to an end.

Filled with intimate portraits of the major players, high-end gossip, and smart financial analysis, House of Cards recounts in delicious narrative form the dramatic events behind the fall of Bear Stearns and what it revealed about the financial world's progression from irrational boom to cataclysmic bust. House of Cards is the Rosetta Stone for understanding the dramatic and the unprecedented events that have reshaped Wall Street and global finance in the past two years.

About the Author: William D. Cohan, a former award-winning investigative newspaper reporter in Raleigh, North Carolina, worked on Wall Street as an investment banker for seventeen years, eventually becoming managing director at JPMorgan Chase. He is the bestselling author of The Last Tycoons, winner of the 2007 FT/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award, and a frequent contributor to CNBC, Fortune, and the Financial Times. He lives in New York City and Columbia County, New York.

About the Performer: Winner of several AudioFile Earphones Awards, Alan Sklar has narrated over 100 audiobooks, including Black Hawk Down by Mark Bowden, The Kennedys: America's Emerald Kings by Thomas Maier, and The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright. The Dartmouth graduate's theatre credits include Hamlet, Taming of the Shrew, The Seagull, and many modern roles. Alan has also narrated thousands of corporate videos for clients such as NASA, Sikorsky Aircraft, IBM, Dannon, Pfizer, AT&T, and SONY. "I am so pleased, as is my husband, to have found a narrator that holds our attention so well that we have come to compare every other narrator to him (you). So far we have found none with such a talent as yours. We very much plan to listen to as many of your works as we can find." --Sandi King, a letter to Mr. Sklar