Latest news with #BryanBurrough
Bloomberg
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Bloomberg
The Case for Monogramming Everything
When I reached the final section of Graydon Carter's delicious new memoir, When the Going Was Good, one paragraph caused me to let out a sharp gasp. It wasn't a celebrity anecdote, like the time a Vanity Fair editor got locked in the bathroom at Cannes until the door was kicked down by Jean-Claude Van Damme. It wasn't even that writer Bryan Burrough was once paid $500,000 to write three stories a year for the magazine (though that did make me choke a little).
New York Times
31-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Even the Cowboys Are Bigger in Texas
THE GUNFIGHTERS: How Texas Made the West Wild, by Bryan Burrough In the John Ford film 'The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,' Maxwell Scott, the editor of The Shinbone Star, hears the U.S. senator Ransom Stoddard confess that he was not the man who shot the villainous Valance. The editor spikes the story, explaining to a surprised Stoddard, 'This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.' In 'The Gunfighters,' a lively chronicle of the way real-life cowboys and their high-noon duels captured American attention in the late 1800s, the journalist Bryan Burrough — best known for 'Barbarians at the Gate,' his classic exploration of the wild, wild east of 1980s Wall Street — prints the facts, the legends, the whole shootin' match. These pages read more like a movie script than a history book. Between the end of the Civil War and the dawn of the 20th century, social order in the American West straddled the rule of law and the grip of a gun. Roles on the frontier shifted constantly: Gunfighters became marshals, cowboys became killers, pimps became lawmen. And many gangsters of the prairie became heroes, celebrated in a way that murderers in Boston or Baltimore could only envy. Why? Blame it on Texas, Burrough argues. Texans had ongoing, bloody face-offs with Mexicans to their south, and Comanches in their midst. Violence was to be expected; even insisted upon. Moreover, while a cop on the corner could protect your store in New York, vigilante violence was probably the only way to secure 'millions of cattle roaming free across millions of acres' out West. Add to that a media eager to romanticize Texans' perverse Southern sense of 'honor,' whereby 'gentlemen' avenged the mildest slight by dueling. There was money to be made peddling lies about swashbuckling frontier gunfighters across hundreds of miles of telegraph wires to clerks in cities around the country. Burrough follows the winding facts wherever they lead. At times I felt like I was reading a Russian novel as so many characters crisscrossed and double-crossed: one day a villain, the next a victim. But it's also satisfying to watch Burrough explode the legends of the late frontier the way Butch Cassidy dynamited safes. Wild Bill Hickok, to start with, 'was a titanic fraud' and 'the fake patient zero of the gunfighter myth.' A former Union scout turned lawman, Hickok allegedly killed hundreds, but the real number, off the battlefield, was probably fewer than 10. The Texan outlaw John Wesley Hardin, on the other hand, was no fabulist. Burrough reveals the hero of Bob Dylan's 1967 ballad to be a psychopath. 'Literally,' Burrough writes, 'a serial killer.' He shot Black men for little or no reason (even by the standards of the time, Hardin was a vicious, violent racist) and seems to have killed a man for snoring. He had already murdered as many as 24 people by his 18th birthday. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Spectator
21-05-2025
- Business
- Spectator
It's time to get rid of the Rich List
Here's a takeover tale that captures the zeitgeist. It involves two FTSE 250 companies and some deep-pocketed US investors – and I'll explain it as simply as I can. In essence, how would you feel if your GP surgery fell into the hands of American investors associated with the book title Barbarians at the Gate? The first of the two London-listed companies is Assura, which owns 600 NHS surgeries and diagnostic facilities and has accepted a cash offer of £1.6 billion from a pair of New York investment giants. They are Stone-peak, which holds a huge global portfolio of infrastructure assets, and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, whose initials KKR may be familiar to older readers as a pioneer of aggressive private–equity dealmaking – most famously the 1989 buyout (chronicled by Bryan Burrough and John Helyar in the Barbarians bestseller) of the food and tobacco group RJR Nabisco. Imbued with Trumpist swagger, investors like these habitually prowl the London market for undervalued targets. The second company, Primary Health Properties, is the only other significant player in Assura's marketplace, as the owner of 516 GP facilities in the UK and Ireland – and has cut in to offer £1.7 billion for Assura in cash and shares. KKR claims PHP's deal will hit competition issues, though the merged company would hold a relatively small proportion of the NHS surgery estate, most of which is owned by the GPs themselves. In an era in which public markets are shrinking and private equity is rampant, largely to the detriment of smaller investors, this is a rare example of a listed company challenging the Goliath of KKR and its ilk.
Bloomberg
23-04-2025
- Business
- Bloomberg
Empaths at the Gate: KKR and a Stanford Psychologist Measure People Skills
In 2011, KKR & Co. bought an industrial company in Minnesota and did something unusual for a private equity firm—it invited factory workers to share ownership. A key plant with a major morale problem was losing employees and had a sky-high accident rate. Giving workers an equity stake, the thinking went, would increase loyalty, engagement and performance. The results were promising enough that KKR began issuing equity stakes to workers at other companies it owned, at first mainly in the manufacturing sector, where annual turnover rates are routinely above 40%. KKR, which manages $600 billion in assets firmwide, is most famous for leveraged buyouts, such as in the bare-knuckle battle for control of RJR Nabisco chronicled in Bryan Burrough and John Helyar's 1989 bestseller, Barbarians at the Gate. But it has an interest in the management of a vast private equity portfolio of 250 companies with a combined total of more than 850,000 employees. Today its employee ownership model is in place at more than 65 of those companies, including publishing giant Simon & Schuster LLC, and the firm's private equity business in the Americas is now pledging to bring the setup to every deal in which it buys a controlling stake.
