Description
The rise and fall of Ireland’s most dazzling tycoon. Matt Cooper’s The Maximalist tells of Tony O’Reilly: the rugby hero who became CEO of Heinz at 33, built a media empire, and lost it all — the Icarus of Irish business, flying highest just before the fall.
Cooper writes with novelistic flair: the charm, the deals, the media wars, the spectacular collapse. O’Reilly’s story is the Celtic Tiger in miniature: brilliance, hubris, and the long fall, told with the pace of a thriller and the judgment of history.
The great Irish business biography: gripping and Shakespearean. For anyone fascinated by how the mighty fall — and how high they flew first. Cooper’s O’Reilly is Icarus in a pinstripe suit: thrilling, tragic, and utterly Irish. Business biography doesn’t get better than this. Rugby star to Heinz chief to fallen emperor: O’Reilly’s trajectory is pure drama. Cooper narrates the rise and ruin superbly.
‘I want more of everything.’ That was Tony O’Reilly’s creed — and in The Maximalist, journalist Matt Cooper tells the epic story of the Irishman who lived by it. Rugby legend, CEO of Heinz, chairman of Independent News & Media: O’Reilly strode into the twenty-first century as one of Ireland’s most celebrated businessmen, a figure of almost mythic success.
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But it was never enough. Cooper documents in unflinching detail the meteoric rise and the spectacular fall — the deals, the debts, and the 2008 financial crisis that brought the empire crashing down, ending in bankruptcy in 2015. Drawing on extensive research and interviews, he paints a portrait of a man of extraordinary charm and ambition, undone by the very appetite that made him great.
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An Irish epic of money, power, and hubris, The Maximalist is essential reading for anyone fascinated by business, biography, and the timeless drama of the rise and the fall. A cautionary tale for our times — and a portrait of an Ireland transformed.
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