getAbstract Summary: Get the key points from this book in less than 10 minutes.

J. Edward Ketz has written a very curious sort of accounting book. About half of it consists of technical information about accounting and its misuse, and the other half is an impassioned polemic about the need for reform. He includes some anomalous editorial quirks; for instance, midway through the book is an appendix consisting of the entire text of an SEC report. Most appendices appear at the ends of books. The author is clearly a professor on a soapbox, an academic-preacher hybrid with a flair for the eloquent purple phrase. He effectively identifies some of the accounting principles that managers who are bent on deception abuse most often. Although this looks like a textbook, getAbstract.com finds that it could serve quite adequately as an investor's introduction to accounting fraud. The author's rhetorical flourishes take a lot of the dreariness out of the subject of accounting, and will keep most readers alert long enough to finish the book - or at least to read as far as the appendix.

Book Publisher:

Wiley