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#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Big Oil and Gas Versus Democracy—Winner Take All

“A rollickingly well-written book, filled with fascinating, exciting, and alarming stories about the impact of the oil and gas industry on the world today.”—The New York Times Book Review

In 2010, the words “earthquake swarm” entered the lexicon in Oklahoma. That same year, a trove of Michael Jackson memorabilia—including his iconic crystal-encrusted white glove—was sold at auction for over $1 million to a guy who was, officially, just the lowly forestry minister of the tiny nation of Equatorial Guinea. And in 2014, Ukrainian revolutionaries raided the palace of their ousted president and found a zoo of peacocks, gilded toilets, and a floating restaurant modeled after a Spanish galleon. Unlikely as it might seem, there is a thread connecting these events, and Rachel Maddow follows it to its crooked source: the unimaginably lucrative and equally corrupting oil and gas industry.

With her trademark black humor, Maddow takes us on a switchback journey around the globe, revealing the greed and incompetence of Big Oil and Gas along the way, and drawing a surprising conclusion about why the Russian government hacked the 2016 U.S. election. She deftly shows how Russia’s rich reserves of crude have, paradoxically, stunted its growth, forcing Putin to maintain his power by spreading Russia’s rot into its rivals, its neighbors, the West’s most important alliances, and the United States. Chevron, BP, and a host of other industry players get their star turn, most notably ExxonMobil and the deceptively well-behaved Rex Tillerson. The oil and gas industry has weakened democracies in developed and developing countries, fouled oceans and rivers, and propped up authoritarian thieves and killers. But being outraged at it is, according to Maddow, “like being indignant when a lion takes down and eats a gazelle. You can’t really blame the lion. It’s in her nature.”

Blowout is a call to contain the lion: to stop subsidizing the wealthiest businesses on earth, to fight for transparency, and to check the influence of the world’s most destructive industry and its enablers. The stakes have never been higher. As Maddow writes, “Democracy either wins this one or disappears.”

Reviewer: D. F. Watt
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: A brilliant deep dive into the geopolitics of the fossil fuel companies - a wake up call to action!
Review: This is for sure some of Rachel Maddow's best work. And that's saying something given her prior achievements in relationship to ‘deep-dive’ journalism. It should be required reading for anybody who wants to understand how we got on the near precipice of the staggering environmental catastrophe known as ‘global warming’ and now increasingly referred to with that other euphemism - ’climate change’. The book is riveting, charming, infuriating, and brilliant in its depiction of the co-option of many governments, particularly our own, in the breakneck sociopathic/utilitarian exploitation of natural resources, in the service of unlimited fossil fuels, long-term environmental consequences be damned. All skillfully rationalized (jobs, energy independence, 'progress,' etc.)And yet I have to say, despite my enormous respect for this book, it comes up short framing the bigger picture of how something this catastrophic might really have happened. Standing back a goodly distance, one has to say that one common denominator is that we find sociopaths or at least individuals with significant sociopathic features in leadership positions within both powerful global corporations and within many governments. Rachel's book is littered with them - they are the stars and cast of her story. They simply do not care about the consequences to others of their exploitation of the environment, do not care that they are sacrificing the long-term planetary health for short-term gain, and simply do not care in anything but the most token fashion about the world's citizens, especially the less fortunate and less privileged ones who will certainly bear the extremely punitive impacts of climate change in the intermediate term. Not only do they not care but I believe many of them are genuinely psychologically incapable of caring. On the other hand, they care greatly about money, and the acquisition and corrupt exercise of power. And that's the problem. What the hell are we doing? Rachel talks about how real democracy is the only answer to this – but it's worth remembering that our increasingly manipulated democracy just gave the reins of an aggrandized presidency to Donald Trump, perhaps our second clearly sociopathic president since WWII. But they are everywhere.That is the question which the book begs but does not ask explicitly: why do we so often put sociopaths in charge – not in one place but all over the place? Can't we see who they are? This is really the disturbing question that Rachel does not ask us clearly enough to ponder. Why do we find people like Trump, Putin, Duterte, Erdoğan and yes, paradigmatically Hitler, worthy of leadership and the public trust? How did Putin become the richest and most powerful man in the world running what is essentially a Mafia state with nuclear weapons, working to destabilize and undermine all the Western democracies? What is wrong with us, that as sheep that we repeatedly and willingly enable the most ruthless of wolves?Even a cursory review of our history forces a conclusion that this alarming trend of populist naïveté, and the serial give away of power to the sociopathic is nothing new. If anything, quite the opposite. We apparently have been suckers for a never-ending parade of sociopathic and narcissistic leaders who have charmed us, seduced us and demagogued us into giving them power for as long as we have had human history, often times by channeling populist fear and hatred for out groups and other all-too-convenient scapegoats. The worst forms of tribalism appear to be the best friends and core weaponry of the worst sociopathic leaders. While they don't care about the environment, or the masses they exploit, they do care deeply about money and power. And they are good at acquiring and keeping it - and getting more of it! But it's never enough, as nothing seems to fill a hidden emptiness.And yet this answer itself is also unsatisfying - and gets each of us off the hook. We have to confess that our own utilitarian attitude towards Nature, that the biosphere on this planet is just a pile of resources to exploit without concern, and not something that we have to shepherd and care for, this exploitive and utilitarian attitude has been the invisible partner and enabler of our sociopathic corporate and government leadership around the exploitation of fossil fuels.Fossil fuels have powered the wonders of our technological civilization, but that has led us to a fundamental overconfidence. We have too much faith in technology – technology cannot fix everything, and it cannot replace a fatally damaged ecology. One thing is clear – we are running out of time in which to figure these things out, to save the good and even wondrous parts of our technological civilization. Rachel's brilliant book hopefully will motivate us to take desperately needed action . . . and soon, and to better see through the fog of lies by those with the sickest of motives. As she says, real democracy must win out, or it, and much of the biosphere, dies in a sixth mass extinction that already has a scary level of momentum.

Reviewer: martha domont
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: The “Devil’s Excrement” and why love it
Review: May I first admit the only reason I would be taking precious free space in my brain or week to read a history of fossil fuel is because my favorite “Professor” wrote it. That being said I bought the book and then the audible as I listen to books while swimming laps and did not want to miss R Maddow’s reading of this sluggish subject. I’m so glad I did too. It was fascinating, informative, presently relevant and with her sardonic humor, worth every word. I learned so much and recalled all the incidents of oil spills, lack of clean-up resources, fracking seismic horrors, Shell drilling in Egypt until the 60’s, Dino the Sinclair’s dinosaur who was often parked in our driveway in Indianapolis as my father carted him around the state as Sinclair’s field manager but I found the Ah-ha! Rex Tillerson, Putin connections and the current criminal political disaster we are living through today so understandable, despicable and relevant. Oil has always been a useful yet utterly destructive natural resource and is best described by OPEC originator Perez Alfonso as the “ the devil’s excrement “.Maddow is, as always, a scholar who brings annoying and potentially dry truth to matter and does so eloquently, humorously and with a skill that makes one want her class or in this case her book to continue to the next chapter. I’m going to reread this one for sure so I can mark up my book with highlights I want to reference again. I’ve already recommended this book to everyone I know.

Reviewer: greytfriend
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title: critical, disturbing reporting conveyed with fantastic storytelling
Review: She’s such a great storyteller, it was really enjoyable and easy to read even though the subject is so often infuriating. She’s really good, I’d read anything she wrote now that I’ve read about the military in Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power and oil & gas industry here and enjoyed both despite having no previous interest in either. And I learned a tremendous amount of really important subjects in both books. Just get whatever she writes, pals, so interesting. Oh, and get Bag Man. Podcast and book, both great. I know, I sound like such a fangirl. I wasn’t like this before the books. She’s just such an engaging storyteller. This isn’t about politics, it’s about skill at reporting and conveying info.OK, right, this book. Wow, if you want to understand a lot more about how the world works, read this. I had a sense about how much oil & gas ruled DC politics, but this really helped me understand how oil & gas are trying and frequently succeeding at ruling the world. Important reporting.

Reviewer: Amazon Customer
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: Great read, good author.

Reviewer: Pierre KOHNEN
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: Perfekt

Reviewer: P. Baziotopoulos
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: Valuable book received in excellent condition ...Thank you

Reviewer: daniel
Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: Excellent book.The writer has brilliantly described the reckless actions of oil companies and the individuals involved across companies and governments.

Reviewer: Maria Ashot
Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars
Title:
Review: Rachel Maddow is a celebrity journalist, a good one. I enjoy her work 90% of the time. She loves to do history & sometimes does it well. Over the course of the past year, however, her attention has been divided among many subjects. She did an excellent podcast on Spiro Agnew, that I listened to from start to finish (even though I only very rarely take the time for podcasts). She has her nightly show, densely packed with content & usually revelatory, occasionally featuring unusual guests who contribute immensely to understanding. But then she also found time to do this book. I was excited. However, having read the book, I am underwhelmed. It's a gloss, sometimes an inaccurate gloss, on important subject matter. The material is useful, but the omissions are actually glaring & kind of shockingly elided. Example: summarizing what led to the rise of the criminally corrupt Kremlin crisis we see today, that brought about the attack on US political life, in just a few pages, is not a good idea. Too much is left out. Masha Gessen is quoted a lot, being apparently the source of the "digest of recent Russian history" -- although, frankly, Khodorkovsky is readily accessible; Nemtsov's daughter, Anna, is accessible; Garry Kasparov has written some brilliant books on the subject -- and the result is something so limp, so quaintly secondary-school level, that it does not do the job claimed. Understanding the Russian oil industry of today, including its claimed right to help raze Syria, requires understanding both the Soviet-era oil export industry much more than Gessen (who apparently was the researcher?) bothers to, while also factoring in what happened in Baku in the 19th c., when Russian capital & imperial enthusiasm helped fuse a lot of other interests, that Gessen never mentioned to Rachel, into the current global petroleum corporate architecture. Face it, not just the Rockefeller's but 100s of other socially-prominent 19th century households (including the British Royal Family, so closely attached to their own Russian cousins, who were of course early investors in Baku) shaped the oil industry of today, with all its wrongs as well as all its positives. And they remain vested in it. That is never once mentioned, considered or explained in "Blowout." It's like, "Rockefellers" and then "Putin." The role of Yeltsin's "privatization czar," Chubais, is never once mentioned. Yeltsin is presented as almost a charming man who was seduced to join the dark side, instead of actually having been a pawn of those interests from the start, when the Bushes -- as they themselves later boasted in the Atlantic -- chose to back him over the more scrupulous, non-moneygrubbing Gorbachev. More comprehensive, detailed histories of the oil industry are available from Amazon. They are not hard to read. I simply don't think Rachel Maddow had enough time, given the other things she was doing, to read her own book carefully and to consider the questions it does not answer. It may feel patriotic for an American to start by celebrating Rockefeller, but that, too, is a gross oversimplification. This book will not help anyone understand why Iran is a major player in the global oil markets (answer: because of Baku), nor Venezuela, nor Mexico. It says many useful things, occasionally saying them well (gratuitous profanity should have been edited out), but it leaves too much out. It feels rushed. I would not recommend it to the specialist or the serious student of history. I would not recommend it to people who love good writing, or excellent journalism. I would not recommend it to fans of Rachel Maddow. I would recommend it only to people who want to start somewhere in their study of this important industry that shapes our social & economic reality today, but only if they promise to read other, more comprehensive books, as well, faithfully, as I am doing. At this very moment, if you want to help the planet, there are more important books. If you want to help America, there are more important books.