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The oil industry provides the lifeblood of modern civilization, and bestselling books have been written about the industry and even individual companies in it, like ExxonMobil. But the modern oil industry is an amazingly shady meeting ground of fixers, gangsters, dictators, competing governments, and multinational corporations, and until now, no book has set out to tell the story of this largely hidden world. The global fleet of some 11,000 tankers—that's tripled during the past decade—moves approximately 2 billion metric tons of oil annually. And every stage of the route, from discovery to consumption, is tainted by corruption and violence, even if little of that is visible to the public. Based on trips to New York, Washington, Houston, London, Paris, Geneva, Phnom Penh, Dakar, Lagos, Baku, and Moscow, among other far-flung locals, The Secret World of Oil includes up-close portraits of a shadowy Baku-based trader; a high-flying London fixer; and an oil dictator's playboy son who has to choose one of his eleven luxury vehicles when he heads out to party in Los Angeles. Supported by funding from the prestigious Open Society, this is both an entertaining global travelogue and a major work of investigative reporting.
The oil industry provides the lifeblood of modern civilization, and bestselling books have been written about the industry and even individual companies in it, like ExxonMobil. But the modern oil industry is an amazingly shady meeting ground of fixers, gangsters, dictators, competing governments, and multinational corporations, and until now, no book has set out to tell the story of this largely hidden world. The global fleet of some 11,000 tankers—that's tripled during the past decade—moves approximately 2 billion metric tons of oil annually. And every stage of the route, from discovery to consumption, is tainted by corruption and violence, even if little of that is visible to the public. Based on trips to New York, Washington, Houston, London, Paris, Geneva, Phnom Penh, Dakar, Lagos, Baku, and Moscow, among other far-flung locals, The Secret World of Oil includes up-close portraits of a shadowy Baku-based trader; a high-flying London fixer; and an oil dictator's playboy son who has to choose one of his eleven luxury vehicles when he heads out to party in Los Angeles. Supported by funding from the prestigious Open Society, this is both an entertaining global travelogue and a major work of investigative reporting.
In a bustling city, Adelaide lives alone and watches those who pass her window, but a chance encounter with a kindred spirit brings her out of her shell.
Billionaire oil trader Marc Rich for the first time talks at length about his private life (including his expensive divorce from wife Denise); his invention of the spot oil market, which made his fortune and changed the world economy; his lucrative and unpublicized dealings with Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran, Fidel Castro's Cuba, war-ravaged Angola, and apartheid South Africa; his quiet cooperation with the Israeli and U.S. governments (even after he was indicted for tax fraud by Rudy Guiliani) and near-comical attempts by U.S. officials to kidnap him illegally. This sure-to-make-headlines book is the first no-holds-barred biography of Rich, who was famously pardoned by Bill Clinton, and resurfaced in the news during the confirmation hearings of Attorney General Eric Holder. The King of Oil sheds stunning new light on one of the most controversial international businessmen of all time.
Kate Kelly, acclaimed journalist and author of Street Fighters, investigates the world of commodities traders When most of us think of the drama of global finance, we think of stocks and bonds. But commodities? Crude oil and soya beans? Copper and wheat? What could be more boring? That's exactly what the elite commodity traders want us to think. They don't seek the spotlight. They don't want to be as famous as Warren Buffett. Their astonishing wealth was created in obscurity, because they dwell in private companies or deep within large banks and corporations. But if the individuals in the commodities boom have gone unnoticed, their impact has not. Prices of raw materials have exploded. Are the big traders jacking up the cost of petrol, food, and essentials bought by people around the world? How did such immense power end up in the hands of a few? In this riveting book, Kate Kelly takes us inside the inner circle that affects so many things we all depend on. Following a trail from New York to London to Dubai, from hedgefunds and banks to brokers and regulators, she reveals the fullest ever picture of the men who gamble with our future every day. Kate Kelly, author of the New York Times bestseller Street Fighters, covers Wall Street for CNBC. She spent ten years at the Wall Street Journal, where she won a Livingston Award and two Gerald Loeb awards. She lives in Brooklyn with her family.
A master criminal spy, a man who never made a mistake' - the living prototype of James Bond - Sidney Reilly amassed a fortune through the ruthless bartering of influence and information while employed and feared by capitalists and commissars alike. A window into the pre and post-W.W.I era's secret underworld of political and economic intrigue, this extremely readable but academically reliable biography includes many illustrations and photos, plus information that has never before been seen by Russian and British intelligence.'
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning and bestselling author of Ghost Wars and The Achilles Trap "Riveting . . . The most psychologically detailed portrait of the brutal 9/11 mastermind yet." - Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times In The Bin Ladens, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Steve Coll continues where Ghost Wars left off, shedding new light on one of the most elusive families of the twenty-first century. Rising from a famine-stricken desert into luxury, private compounds, and even business deals with Hollywood celebrities, the Bin Ladens have benefited from the tensions and contradictions in a country founded on extreme religious purity, suddenly thrust into a world awash in oil, money, and the temptations of the West. But what do these incongruities mean for globalization, the War on Terror, and America's place in the Middle East? Meticulously researched, The Bin Ladens is the story of a remarkably varied and often dangerous family that has used money, mobility, and technology to dramatically different ends.
This is the story of a gutsy journalist who challenged power-and succeeded. Wanda Jablonski was an investigative reporter, publisher, and power broker who came to wield exceptional influence on twentieth-century geopolitics by shedding light on the secretive world of oil from the 1950s through the 1980s. Jablonski unveiled many mysteries of the oil club, an elite group of Western executives who once controlled the international petroleum business. Nicknamed the midwife of OPEC, Jablonski undermined Big Oil's dominance by exposing the vulnerabilities of the major oil companies and encouraging the rise of oil nationalism. Her scoops, commentaries, and private networking helped shape the debate that led to the creation of OPEC, the oil shocks of the 1970s, and the largest transfer of wealth in history. Tenacious and glamorous, Wanda-as she was known in the oil world-coaxed her way into exploration sites in Middle Eastern deserts, drilling camps in the Venezuelan jungle, male-only boardrooms in New York and London, and the king's harem in Saudi Arabia. She survived threats, boycotts, and suspicions of espionage as she elicited information and insight from CEOs of the oil giants and political leaders, including the shah of Iran. Working for the Journal of Commerce and other New York publications, Jablonski defied the prevailing view that a woman reporting on business had no credibility. In 1961, divorced and suddenly jobless, she took a big gamble by starting her own newsletter, Petroleum Intelligence Weekly, which was soon dubbed the "bible" of the oil world. Today, when conflict in the Middle East and climate change cause us to reexamine our reliance on oil, Jablonski's prescience-whether about oil dependency, cultural insensitivity, or market manipulation-proves remarkable. Anna Rubino, who reported for Jablonski in the 1980s, uses scores of interviews, exclusive access to her private papers, and newly declassified information to tell the dramatic story of this journalistic pioneer and the power of information.
Explaining—and solving—the oil curse in the developing world Countries that are rich in petroleum have less democracy, less economic stability, and more frequent civil wars than countries without oil. What explains this oil curse? And can it be fixed? In this groundbreaking analysis, Michael L. Ross looks at how developing nations are shaped by their mineral wealth—and how they can turn oil from a curse into a blessing. Ross traces the oil curse to the upheaval of the 1970s, when oil prices soared and governments across the developing world seized control of their countries' oil industries. Before nationalization, the oil-rich countries looked much like the rest of the world; today, they are 50 percent more likely to be ruled by autocrats—and twice as likely to descend into civil war—than countries without oil. The Oil Curse shows why oil wealth typically creates less economic growth than it should; why it produces jobs for men but not women; and why it creates more problems in poor states than in rich ones. It also warns that the global thirst for petroleum is causing companies to drill in increasingly poor nations, which could further spread the oil curse. This landmark book explains why good geology often leads to bad governance, and how this can be changed.
A sumptuous monograph presenting for the first time the extraordinarily imaginative and delightful work of visionary artist Renaldo Kuhler (American, 1931-2013). The Secret World of Renaldo Kuhler catapults a thrilling new discovery into the pantheon of the most accomplished visionary--or "outsider"--artists. Like Henry Darger, Howard Finster, George Widener, and Adolf Wölfli, Renaldo Kuhler was an exceptionally gifted artist and possessed an imagination all his own. By day Kuhler was a self-taught scientific illustrator under the employ of the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, for which he created thousands of wonderfully precise illustrations of myriad natural history specimens--reptiles, fish, turtles, and the like. Renaldo Kuhler was an unusual individual, as was instantly clear from his appearance alone. Six-foot-four, with a white beard and ponytail, he wore a custom-tailored uniform consisting of a sleeveless Kelly green suit jacket with wide, black, notched lapels, epaulets, and brass buttons, a matching suit vest, yellow flannel dress shirt, a fleur-de-lis Boy Scout neckerchief, and tight-fitting knee-length shorts ("cotton-blend lederhosen"). However, unbeknownst even to family, friends, andcoworkers, Kuhler was more than an eccentric, gifted scientific illustrator. He was a prolific visionary artist, who, as a teenager in the late 1940s, invented an imaginary country he named Rocaterrania--after Rockland County, New York, where he had lived as a child. For the next sixty years, in secret, he illustrated the nation''s entire history and the prominent characters of its populace. Rocaterrania is a fantastical world, a richly illustrated amalgam of Kuhler''s personal cultural and aesthetic fascinations. Situated just north of the Adirondacks in New York, at the Canada-United States border, Rocaterrania is a sovereign nation of immigrants, from Scandinavia to Eastern Europe. Kuhler invented a complete world populated by a royal family and a succession of leaders resembling historical Russian figures, Women reminiscent of Marlene Dietrich and Janet Leigh play important roles as do bearded men of a seeming Hasidic Jewish heritage, men bearing curious physical similarities to American presidents, and neutants--individuals neither male nor female. Amid forests, mountains, lakes, and rivers, Kuhler''s imaginary country is made up of provinces and cities filled with distinctive Rocaterranian architecture and well-planned railroad and metro systems. Its government is unique, and it has its own religion, Ojallism, and its own evolving language and alphabet. With an organized labor service, a prison system (modeled after a New Jersey state penitentiary), a university system, a Rocaterranian Olympics, and an independent movie industry, Rocaterrania is a nation bustling with dozens of characters and their intrigues.Initially meant to be an escape, Kuhler''s Rocaterrania became a secret lifelong obsession, an intricately coded, metaphorical account through Rocaterrania''s tumultuous history, which dovetailed with Kuhler''s own struggles for independence and freedom.Renaldo was the son of the German-born industrial designer Otto Kuhler, renowned for his Art Deco-era streamlined trains; his Belgian mother had little patience for her son, who was ostracized and bullied throughout his life for being "different." The Kuhler family moved in 1948 from Rockland County, New York, to a remote cattle ranch in the Colorado Rockies--an unbearably isolated environment for the teenaged Renaldo. Retreating to his sketchbooks, journals, and watercolors to invent his imaginary nation of Rocaterrania, young Kuhler wrote, "The ability to fantasize is the ability to survive." The Secret World of Renaldo Kuhler is filled with more than 400 illustrations in pencil, ink, acrylic, oil, gouache, watercolor, colored pencils, and markers, demonstrating Kuhler''s phenomenal draftsmanship and wide range of style--from delicately shaded graphite works to comic-book ink drawings. Complementing Kuhler''s impressive artistry is his gift for analogical thinking, which flowered in his appropriation and reimagining of personalities, places, and events from world history to form a cohesive and fully imagined world. After decades of secrecy, Kuhler eventually first shared his work and the story of his imaginary country with filmmaker Brett Ingram, whom he met by chance in the mid-1990s. In 2009 Ingram released Rocaterrania, a feature-length documentary with prized footage of Kuhler at home and at work, and talking about his creation. WithThe Secret World of Renaldo Kuhler Ingram has written the complete story of Rocaterrania as relayed to him over time by Kuhler, resulting in a fascinating, highly entertaining first and major book about this rare, newly discovered, full-blown visionary outsider artist.