The Taking of Getty Oil: The Full Story of the Most Spectacular and Catastrophic Takeover of all Time

Business & Money

STEVE COLL

Industries

Unwin Hyman Limited

The Taking of Getty Oil: The Full Story of the Most Spectacular - and Castastrophic - Takeover of All Time

Economics

HarperCollins, Publishers

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.

Bin Ladens: Oil, Money, Terrorism and the Secret Saudi World

History

Middle East

Penguin Book

Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America's Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan, 2001-2016

Penguin books, limited

Directorate S - The CIA and America's Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan

Asia

BOOKS ON TAPE]

A larger-than-life account of family, greed, and a courtroom showdown between Big Oil rivals from the New York Times–bestselling author of Private Empire. Pulitzer Prize–winning 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 spectacular—and catastrophic—corporate 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 deal—until 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).

The Taking of Getty Oil: The Full Story of the Most Spectacular - and Catastrophic - Takeover of All Time

Scribner

A true story of family, ambition, and greed in the most bitter and controversial takeover struggle in business history. The high-stakes fight between Texaco and Pennzoil to take over Getty Oil is a startling and intriguing case involving family infighting, courtroom drama, and corporate intrigue that ends in bankruptcy and the largest damages award in American history.

Taking of Getty Oil, The

Biography & History

Audible Studios on Brilliance Audio

Private Empire

The Penguin Press, book club edition

The rise and rise of the Bin Laden family is one of the great stories of the twentieth century; its repercussions have already deeply marked the twenty-first. Until now, however, it is a story that has never been fully told, as the Bin Ladens have successfully fended off attempts to understand the family circles from which Osama sprang. In this the family has been abetted by the kingdom it calls home, Saudi Arabia, one of the most closed societies on earth.Steve Coll’s The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century is the groundbreaking history of a family and its fortune. It chronicles a young illiterate Yemeni bricklayer, Mohamed Bin Laden, who went to the new, oil-rich country of Saudi Arabia and quickly became a vital figure in its development, building great mosques and highways and making himself and many of his children millionaires. It is also a story of the Saudi royal family, whom the Bin Ladens served loyally and without whose capricious favor they would have been nothing. And it is a story of tensions and contradictions in a country founded on extreme religious purity, which then became awash in oil money and dazzled by the temptations of the West. In only two generations the Bin Ladens moved from a famine-stricken desert canyon to luxury jets, yachts, and private compounds around the world, even going into business with Hollywood celebrities. These religious and cultural gyrations resulted in everything from enthusiasm for America—exemplified by Osama’s free-living pilot brother Salem—to an overwhelming determination to destroy it.The Bin Ladens is a meticulously researched, colorful, shocking, entertaining, and disturbing narrative of global integration and its limitations. It encapsulates the unsettling contradictions of globalization in the story of a single family who has used money, mobility, and technology to dramatically varied ends.

The Bin Ladens - The Story of a Family and Its Fortune

Penguin Books, Ltd.

In the great reach for colonies that Europe began hundreds of years ago, at center stage were several curious entities that wielded more power than many governments. The United Company of Merchants of England Trading to the East Indies (commonly known as the East India Company) and its counterpart, the Dutch East India Company, fielded their own warships and armies, coined money and ruled territory eventually taken over by Britain and the Netherlands. Later, the seizure of land by Cecil Rhodes's British South Africa Company also preceded the spread of British pink across the map. Continue reading the main story Related Coverage Times Topic: Exxon Mobil Corporation Centuries from now, historians sweltering away on an overheated planet and looking back to our own times will surely see multinational oil companies as similar players. The way they're reshaping today's world, however, is not by carving out future colonies, but by searching for the oil and gas we're so hungry for in ever more risky places: beneath oceans, in Canadian tar sands, in underground rock formations that require "fracking" and in the environmentally fragile Arctic waters newly accessible as the polar ice cap shrinks - thanks, of course, to our addiction to fossil fuels. That addiction is likely to change the very level of the seas the East India Company's ships sailed in their hunt for cloth and spices, and the floods and droughts ahead may set in motion desperate migrations dwarfing those of colonial times.

Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power

Biographies & Memoirs

Professionals & Academics

Allen Lane.

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Books by STEVE COLL