After the Ball is the story of James Hazen Hyde, who inherited the majority shares in the billion-dollar Equitable Life Assurance Society in 1899 when he was 23, and was forced out five years later, in the wake of a lavish ball. The book is set in the first Gilded Age's freewheeling environment, and draws in such important historical figures E. H. Harriman, Henry Clay Frick, and J.P. Morgan. The story of After the Ball is a close precursor of the current financial scandals. Among its salient characteristics are insider trading, self-dealing, accounting malpractice, and corporate funding of private pleasures. After the Ball also raises thoroughly modern questions about unethical versus criminal behavior, corporate chicanery and responsibility. But it is also a social history, steeped in the symbols of glamour from a sybaritic age; and it is a poignant story of fathers and sons and legacies. These themes: money and glamour, ethics and business, and the passage of power from one generation to the next, are the ingredients of a discussion with parallels in the news nearly every day.