Book of the week: King of Capital by David Carey and John E. Morris

(Crown Business, $27.50)

This respectful portrait of Steve Schwarzman makes the Blackstone Group co-founder seem less interesting than he probably is, said Henry Sender in the Financial Times. The longtime chairman of the legendary private-equity firm “has always been a complicated mix of inappropriate and prescient.” But this book, which was written with “impressive access” to Schwarzman and his partners, mostly sticks to career highlights: how Schwarzman “so brilliantly” built up Blackstone, took it public at the market peak, and sidestepped the worst of the financial crisis. But Schwarzman is also known for enjoying $400 crab legs and for throwing himself a $3 million 60th-birthday bash just three years ago, said Bess Levin in Bloomberg Businessweek. The “barrage” of dealmaking we get here is instructive, to a point. But King of Capital is probably most useful as a reminder that “books for which tycoons grant access are often short on things one might actually want to know about them.”

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