Books by Steve Coll

A larger-than-life account of family, greed, and a courtroom showdown between Big Oil rivals from the New York Timesbestselling author of Private Empire. Pulitzer Prizewinning author Steve Coll is renowned for ';his ability to take complicated, significant business stories and turn them into quick-reading engaging narratives' (Chicago Tribune). Coll is at the height of his talents in this ';riveting' tale of one of the most spectacularand catastrophiccorporate takeovers of all time (Newsday). As the head of a sprawling oil empire, J. Paul Getty was once the world's richest man. But by 1984, eight years after his death, Getty's legacy was in tatters: His children were locked in a bitter feud over the family trust and the company he founded was riven by boardroom turmoil. Then Pennzoil made an agreement with Getty's son, Gordon, to purchase Getty Oil. It was a done dealuntil Texaco swooped in to claim the $10 billion prize. What followed was an epic legal battle that pit ';good ole boy' J. Hugh Liedtke of Pennzoil against the Wall Street brokers behind Texaco's offer. The scandalous details of the case would shock the business world and change the landscape of the oil industry forever. With a large cast of colorful characters and the dramatic pacing of a novel, The Taking of Getty Oil is a ';suspenseful' and ';always intriguing' chronicle of one of the most fascinating chapters in American corporate history (Publishers Weekly).

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.

The Bin Ladens are shrouded in secrecy, living in one of the most closed, unaccountable countries on earth. Little has been known about the world that created Osama - until now.In this gripping account prizewinning journalist Steve Coll has interviewed those closest to the family who rose from Yemeni peasants to jetsetting millionaires in two generations. In doing so, he reveals a Saudi Arabia torn between religious purity and the temptations of the West, telling a story of oil, money, power, patronage and dangerous cultural extremes.