• John Knee is a managing director of Evercore Partners, Inc. (NYSE: EVR) whose CEO, Roger Altman, is friends with former LAZ honchos, Felix Rohatyn and Steve Rattner. Knee is also a friend of Wall Street Journal publisher, Gordon Crovitz and Dow Jones & Company (NYSE: DJ) has been an EVR client. Without disclosing these relationships, the Journal chose Knee to review the book. Knee wrote of the book in his Wall Street Journal review " if you haven't worked at Lazard, or feel a less than fanatically intense interest in Wall Street's version of hand-to-hand combat, "The Last Tycoons" is heavy going and, at more than 700 pages, overlong."
• Anthony Bianco of BusinessWeek has written a flattering cover story on Bruce Wasserstein and needs ongoing access to him. Bianco's review of the book continuously defended Wasserstein. For example, his review stated "Cohan's lengthy account of David-Weill's and Wasserstein's climactic pas de deux might indeed prove definitive despite occasional lapses of analytic judgment. Cohan suggests, for example, that Wasserstein's initial $30 million investment in Lazard was money he'd saved (and would not otherwise have had) by moving to London to avoid paying New York state and city taxes on the $1.4 billion sale of Wasserstein Perella. Setting aside the question of Wasserstein's motive for moving to London, he was a wealthy man who could have pulled $30 million from any of the pockets in one of his bespoke suits."

Those without ties to Lazard -- or those whose ties are one step removed -- viewed the book differently. For example, the New York Times, whose publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. is friends with Rattner, has taken a more balanced approach. On the one hand, it has repeated LAZ's canned statement that the book is "substantially inaccurate, was not fact-checked with the firm and has nothing to do with the present state of Lazard or its business."

And on the other, it published a May 27 review (registration required) by Harvard Kennedy School teacher Richard Parker which said: "Cohan's portrayal of the firm's dominant partners -- whose gargantuan appetites and mercurial habits provide the unifying force behind the book's operatic melodramas -- makes this an epic in its own way. In fact, "The Last Tycoons" bears a striking resemblance to F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Last Tycoon." The Economist, Financial Times and Fortune -- lacking economic ties to LAZ -- also liked the book.

If all this controversy whets your interest, why not read the book to find out what all the fuss is about?

Peter Cohan is President of Peter S. Cohan & Associates, a management consulting and venture capital firm. He also teaches management at Babson College and edits The Cohan Letter. He has no financial interest in Evercore, Lazard or The Last Tycoons.