Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power

The New York Times Book Review…this book isn't so much a story of Exxon Mobil's influence over the American government. Rather, it's a picture of a corporation so large and powerful—operating in some 200 nations and territories—that it really has its own foreign policy…the book assuredly does what it sets out to do: show the inner workings of one of the Western world's most significant concentrations of unelected power.
—Adam Hochschild




The New York Times[Coll's] new book, like his previous ones, is a big dig. Mountains of facts are mined, crushed and consumed as narrative fuel. If Mr. Coll were a corporation, you would want to impose a carbon tax on him. Private Empire is meticulous, multi-angled and valuable. It is also, perhaps surprisingly…impartial…It's among this book's achievements that it attempts to view a dysfunctional energy world, as often as not, through Exxon Mobil's eyes.