Book description
Steve Coll's Private Empire is winner of the FT/GOLDMAN
SACHS BUSINESS BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD 2012. In this prize-winning
book, the author of Ghost Wars and The Bin Ladens
investigates the notoriously mysterious ExxonMobil Corporation and
the secrets of the oil industry
In many of the nations where it operates, ExxonMobil has a
greater sway than that of the US embassy, its annual revenues are
larger than the total economic activity in most countries and in
Washington it spends more on lobbying than any other corporation. Yet
despite its outsized influence, it is to outsiders a black box.
Private Empire begins with the Exxon Valdez accident
in 1989 and closes with the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Steve
Coll's narrative spans the globe, taking readers to Moscow,
impoverished African capitals, Indonesia and elsewhere as ExxonMobil
carries out its activities against a backdrop of blackmail threats,
kidnapping, civil wars, and high-stakes struggles at the Kremlin. In
the US, Coll goes inside ExxonMobil's ruthless Washington lobbying
offices and its corporate headquarters in Irving, Texas, where top
executives oversee a bizarre corporate culture of discipline and secrecy.
Private Empire is the masterful result of Steve Coll's
indefatigable reporting, from the halls of Congress to the oil-laden
swamps of the Niger Delta; previously classified U. S. documents;
heretofore unexamined court records; and many other sources.
Steve Coll is the author of the
New York Times
bestseller
The Bin Ladens
. He is president of the New America Foundation, a nonpartisan public
policy institute headquartered in Washington, D. C., and a staff writer
for
The New Yorker
. He won a Pulitzer prize for explanatory journalism while working at
the
Washingon Post.
He is the author of six other books, including the bestseller
Ghost
Wars,
which won him a second Pulitzer prize. He lives in Washington and New
York.
