Book of the week: Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power by Steve Coll

(Penguin, $36)

“Gigantic and brilliant, ExxonMobil has cut a ruthless path through the Age of Oil,” said Bruce Watson in the San Francisco Chronicle. Journalist Steve Coll calls the company “a corporate state within the American state,” and no wonder. It exercises its own foreign policy, frequently operates in secrecy, and pulls in annual profits greater than the individual GDP of many nations. Coll, a New Yorker staff writer and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, interviewed more than 400 people and traveled to various global hot spots to compile this “riveting and appalling” 685-page portrait of the energy behemoth. Beginning with the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, he describes a corporation that has funded paramilitary forces, backed dictatorships, and regularly strong-armed U.S. politicians. As George W. Bush told India’s prime minister in 2001, “Nobody tells those guys what to do.”

Still, Private Empire is no anti-corporate screed, said Dwight Garner in The New York Times. “It’s among this book’s achievements that it attempts to view a dysfunctional energy world, as often as not, through ExxonMobil’s eyes.” Yes, we get plenty about the company playing cutthroat—bribing oligarchs, intimidating critics, and bankrolling an elaborate effort to undermine scientists’ warnings about global warming. But Coll also makes clear that the company’s core business is providing a product that society has decided it must have, and that there’s a certain honorableness in the stoic way that ExxonMobil performs that service. Coll is so fair, in fact, that his account can become too gray. Good thing he has former CEO Lee “Iron Ass” Raymond as a protagonist. I would read a biography of this fiercely blunt executive “in a heartbeat.”

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I’m left wanting something more, said David Biello in Foreign Policy. That Coll was able to unearth so many details about such a secretive company is “incredibly impressive.” But he never puts the blame for ExxonMobil’s misbehavior where it belongs—with American consumers. This is a corporation that’s been “deputized by us to slake our unquenchable thirst for oil,” whatever the costs. So why do men like Raymond make the decisions they do? It’s conceivable that he considers himself to have been, while running ExxonMobil, a well-paid public servant. Though Coll seems to have bared all the secrets of the most successful corporation ever, its “soul” remains opaque.