Kochland

Reviews

“Deeply and authoritatively reported... [Kochland] marshals a huge amount of information and uses it to help solve two enduring mysteries: how the Kochs got so rich, and how they used that fortune to buy off American action on climate change.”
— Jane Mayer, The New Yorker “Impressive… A corporate history, lucidly told, about the enormous energy conglomerate that has inserted itself into nearly every aspect of daily life, raking in billions along the way.”
— The New York Times “This is fast-paced business history. An episode about ammonia runoff at an oil refinery keeps you turning pages like a John Grisham thriller.”
— NPR.org “Impressive… Kochland is the most definitive account yet of how one of America’s richest and most powerful families amassed its fortune.”
— The Washington Post  “Leonard’s visionary, decade-spanning, and heart-rending investigation into the Koch Empire is indispensable not just for understanding the rise of corporate power in America, but for understanding America itself. Kochland will take its place alongside Chernow’s Titan and Coll’s Private Empire as one of the great accounts of American capitalism.”
— Jesse Eisinger, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of The Chickenshit Club “A Robert Caro-like narrative of business and political power with a brilliant, ruthless, and fascinating monopolist at its center. Leonard devoted eight years to this gem of a book, seeking to understand the mysterious Charles Koch and the Goliath he has taken a half century to construct.”
— Ken Auletta, New York Times bestselling author of Googled “With deep reporting and narrative flair, Leonard has rendered a revealing portrait of the Koch family as ruthless businessmen and savvy political operatives who quietly built an empire and defined the face of American capitalism and its hold on Washington over the last fifty years.”
— William Cohan, New York Times bestselling author of House of Cards “Superb… Among the best books ever written about an American corporation… Not since Andrew Ross Sorkin’s landmark Too Big to Fail (2009) have I said this about a book, but Kochland warrants it: If you’re in business, this is something you need to read.”
— Bryan Burrough, The New York Times Book Review “Kochland is a dazzling feat of investigative reporting and epic narrative writing, a tour de force that takes the reader deep inside the rise of a vastly powerful family corporation that has come to influence American workers, markets, elections, and the very ideas debated in our public square. Leonard’s work is fair and meticulous, even as it reveals the Kochs as industrial Citizens Kane of our time.”
— Steve Coll, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Private Empire “If you want a crash course in the evolution of postmodern capitalism over the last five decades read Kochland.”
— New York Journal of Books "Business reporter Christopher Leonard's emphatic, decade-long investigative research has yielded an in-depth examination of the secretive privately held Wichita-based Koch Industries. Jacques Roy provides a masterful narration. . . . [His] low-key professorial tone eases the listener through a highly complex market-based business portrait. It would be challenging to find a clearer discussion of how dark money may wield profound influence on American politics." —AudioFile Magazine Expand reviews