Bryan Burrough Books

The 1980s were defined by an intoxicating mix of deregulation, easy credit, and intellectual bravado. Wall Street was fueled by new financial instruments, chief among them the leveraged buyout, or LBO. It was the brainchild of firms like Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. (KKR), who saw debt not as a lia...

From Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco

R.J. Reynolds was founded on tobacco—on the smooth, steady profits of cigarettes that turned nicotine into empire. Nabisco, on the other hand, was built on sweetness: cookies, crackers, and snacks that filled millions of American pantries. When the two merged in 1985, the result was a sprawling cong...

From Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco

The traditional tale of the Alamo didn’t arise immediately after the 1836 battle. In fact, the earliest contemporary accounts were fragmented and contested. The site had been a Franciscan mission turned military garrison, and during the struggle between Texian settlers and the Mexican army, it becam...

From Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth

To understand the Alamo, one must understand the context in which it unfolded. The Texas Revolution was not simply a war of independence from Mexico; it was intimately tied to the politics of slavery, land, and Anglo expansionism. When settlers from the American South began flooding into Mexican Tex...

From Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth