Ron Shelp recalls the day Maurice “Hank” Greenberg called him into his office at American International Group’s Pine Street headquarters shortly after President Nixon went to China. “Ron, I want to go back to China,” the company ‘s chairman and CEO, Mr. Greenberg, said to his trusted public affairs officer. “And we damn well better be first.”

AIG’s special relationship with China, which began the day Cornelius Vander Starr walked down the gangplank of a steamer in Shanghai in 1919, was destined to continue under Mr. Greenberg. He was a devoted protégé of Mr. Starr and was determined in the early 1970s to reclaim the lucrative market in China that AIG lost in 1949 when Chairman Mao forced capitalists to leave the country.

In “Fallen Giant: The Amazing Story of Hank Greenberg and the History of AIG,” Mr. Shelp gives readers the only definitive insider’s account of the company that Mr. Greenberg grew into a world powerhouse, and his fall from power as the result of a “hyperactive” attorney general’s gubernatorial ambitions.

New York’s current attorney general, Andrew Cuomo, faces an interesting dilemma, according to Mr. Shelp. On the one hand, he has essentially inherited Governor Spitzer’s vendetta against Mr. Greenberg. But Mr. Cuomo’s father, Governor Mario Cuomo, is a longtime supporter of Mr. Greenberg, one of the city’s most generous philanthropists.

On Monday an independent committee cleared Mr. Greenberg of allegations made by Mr. Spitzer that he liquidated assets of the Starr Foundation for less than their market values in 1969 and 1970. Even though the charitable foundation’s current assets are about $4 billion, Mr. Spitzer claimed Mr. Greenberg and other executors cheated the Starr estate out of assets that would today be worth $6 billion.

“It’s just a guess, but I find it hard to believe that [Andrew Cuomo] will try to seize $6 billion,” Mr. Shelp said. “Then again, it would certainly be a good way to get a lot of press. He sees how it got Eliot Spitzer elected governor.”

Judging by one account in the book, Mr. Cuomo might do well to side with Mr. Spitzer instead of his father: When former Goldman Sachs chairman, John Whitehead, wrote a newspaper opinion column questioning Mr. Spitzer’s harsh treatment of the embattled AIG chief, he experienced Mr. Spitzer’s wrath and wrote about it in a subsequent column.

“After reading my op-ed piece, Mr. Spitzer tried to phone me. I was traveling in Texas but he reached me early in the afternoon.” Then Mr. Spitzer said, ‘Mr. Whitehead, it’s now a war between us and you’ve fired the first shot. I will be coming after you. You will pay the price. This is only the beginning and you will pay dearly for what you have done. You will wish you had never written the letter.'”

According to Mr. Whitehead: “He went on in the same vein for several more sentences and then abruptly hung up. I was astounded. No one had ever talked to me like that before. It was a little scary.”

For AIG, going back to China in the 1970s was a little scary, too. Mr. Shelp said that among the attorneys AIG hired to help them with their entrees to the Chinese government, one was particularly experienced with doing the same for Chase Manhattan Bank and its then chairman, David Rockefeller.

“The lawyer called me and said that if we sent one of our proposals to the Chinese, we’d be dead in the water. It turns out we were using a translator in America, and the Mandarin of 1973 was a lot different than when he left China in 1949: The cover of our proposal translated into ‘American International Clique.'”

Not only did they hire a professional translator in China, but AIG employees began to re-connect with old colleagues that they hadn’t seen in three decades. Even though Mr. Starr had been forced to leave, he insisted that all the claims be paid in full.

“The Chinese never forgot that,” Mr. Shelp said. “Hank Greenberg would eventually make 35 trips to China and made sure AIG was the first to come back. And Hank keeps going back to China even today.”