Booklist Reviews
*Starred Review* By almost any standard, the oil and gas industry can be viewed as a renegade enterprise that not only enjoys a sacrosanct protection from government interference but also flourishes, thanks to sweetheart tax breaks, bountiful subsidies, and lax regulations. Known for her intense inquiries into complex subjects, Maddow brings her laser-like intuitiveness and keen and wily perception to Big Oil, that stalwart of global economics, and the shadowy nexus of commerce and politics. Maddow likes murky, the murkier the better, and her examination of the intricacies of off-shore drilling, transnational pipelines, and hydraulic fracking is as deep as the coveted wells themselves. But there's more afoot than corrupt practices, including a labyrinthine connection between Oklahoma oil fields and Putin's Kremlin that goes a long way to explaining Russia's 2016 election interference. Cameo appearances are made by familiar Trump team members Rex Tillerson, Paul Manafort, and Carter Page along with Putin henchmen Igor Serchin and Dmitry Firtash and energy titans Harold Hamm and Aubrey McClendon. Maddow's trademark snark is on display, as is her geeky fascination with the minutiae buried beneath these massive social injustices. Like trailblazing journalists before her, Maddow exposes both the slapdash and sinister practices underlying geopolitics and energy policies and revels in peeling back the layers of malfeasance to stoke righteous outrage.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: As a best-selling writer and the Emmy-winning host of MSNBC's Rachel Maddow Show, Maddow has a large, enthusiastic following who will be eager to check out this important exposé. Copyright 2019 Booklist Reviews.
Choice Reviews
This engaging, wide-ranging account of the oil and gas industry is in the best tradition of investigative journalism. Focusing primarily on the US and Russia in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, Maddow (who is a political science scholar as well as a respected political commentator) offers a wealth of technical and historical facts that reveal "the nexus of fuel and corruption" (p. 230) emblematic of an industry that has generated vast wealth, political influence, and environmental damage. Blowout is especially informative on the Russian industry and its connections to Vladimir Putin's political project. Marked by smooth storytelling, superb wit, and a colorful cast of characters, this is sophisticated journalism rather than historical or social science analysis, but it drives an enlightening account of a wide range of negative consequences and corrupt behavior attributable to the industry. Minor flaws include mistaken conflation of the economic phenomena known as Dutch disease and resource curse and a meandering flow that sometimes lacks focus. But the central message is compelling and important: a different approach to managing the industry could vastly improve social welfare. Maddow sums up with a warning that democracy must overcome the malign influence of this industry or risk demise as a system of governance. Summing Up: Essential. All readers.
--R. Lotspeich, emeritus, Indiana State University
Richard Lotspeich
emeritus, Indiana State University
Richard Lotspeich Choice Reviews 57:10 June 2020 Copyright 2020 American Library Association.Kirkus Reviews
Maddow (Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power, 2012) examines the disconcertingly disproportionate influence of big oil on world affairs. The author may be a popular, progressive news-and-commentary anchor on MSNBC, but it's not to be forgotten that she holds a doctorate in politics from Oxford and seems to devour whole libraries of data before breakfast each day. In her second book, she takes on the oil oligarchy, beginning with, fittingly, an opening: the first of a Russian-owned chain of gas stations in New York City in 2003, its celebrity highlight Vladimir Putin, accompanied by Sen. Chuck Schumer. Putin had not been in power long, though long enough that the U.S. ambassador to Russia "had already warned of the risk that [he] would evolve into an autocrat who monopolized control of government and the economy behind the window dressing of democratic institutions." From there, Maddow goes on to develop a densely argued exercise in connecting dots: A corrupt Russia—one in which, for example, the builders of the Olympic Village in Sochi skimmed off upward of $30 billion—hitched its wagon to a moribu nd petro-economy, one that could not survive with the sanctions imposed on it by the Obama administration. This set in motion the whole chain of events now playing out, including Russian tampering in the 2016 election and the not-coincidental haste of the Trump administration to lift those sanctions the moment it entered power. There are many stops along the way. Maddow looks, for example, at the seismic effects of fracking in Oklahoma, a petroleum-extraction technology that, as one voter remarked, afforded "an issue that will turn a red state blue." Updating Daniel Yergin's The Prize with three decades' worth of material, Maddow concludes that big oil can and will do nothing to regulate itself and argues that "containment is the small-c conservative answer" to the problem of "the industry's reliance on corruption and capture." Expect a tweetstorm as Maddow's indictment of a corrupt industry finds readers—and it deserves many. Copyright Kirkus 2019 Kirkus/BPI Communications. All rights reserved.
Library Journal Reviews
Maddow (host, MSNBC's
Publishers Weekly Reviews
Petroleum-industry profits inexorably subvert good governance, argues this scattershot indictment of the oil and natural gas industries. Maddow (