Kochland

Starred review from June 17, 2019
American capitalism at its most successful and domineering is at the center of this sweeping history of a much-vilified company. Business journalist Leonard (The Meat Racket) recounts the 50-year growth of Koch Industries, a privately held, infamously secretive conglomerate—with interests in oil refineries, pipelines, lumber, commodities trading, fertilizer, and greeting cards—under CEO Charles Koch, whose libertarian ideology and political donations make him a godfather of the Republican right. Leonard paints Koch as a brilliant businessman whose fanatically entrepreneurial company—employees fervidly embrace his “market-based management” philosophy—thrives on turning underperforming assets into moneymakers. He also probes a very seamy underbelly: an oil-theft scandal and illegal dumping of toxins (the company has since cleaned up its act, Leonard notes), a penchant for gaming government regulations while denouncing the regulatory state, and heavy-handed lobbying and political organizing to stymie climate change legislation. The company’s ruthlessness is spotlighted in his accounts of Koch’s sometimes violent battles with unions; Leonard profiles workers whose wages and security dwindled while computerized regimentation and staffing cuts made their jobs grueling and unsafe. Leonard’s superb investigations and even-handed, clear-eyed reportage stand out. Agent: Lauren Sharp, Aevitas Creative Management.

June 15, 2019
A massively reported deep dive into the unparalleled corporate industrial giant Koch Industries. In 1967, Charles Koch inherited from his recently deceased father the leadership of a medium-sized, nearly invisible industrial conglomerate based in Wichita, Kansas. Charles would build the conglomerate into an entity so sprawling, profitable, and politically powerful that it seems to defy all reason. "Koch's operations span the entire landscape of the American economy," writes business reporter Leonard (The Meat Racket: The Secret Takeover of America's Food Business, 2014). "The company's story is the story of America's energy system, of its blue-collar factory workers, of millionaire derivatives traders, corporate lobbyists, and private equity deal makers." Brother David shared ownership and participated in management of the company, which never sold stock to the public. Another brother challenged Charles by filing lawsuits but, over the decades, finally pulled back. The fourth brother never became involved in the operation of the business. As the author shows, the Koch brand does not appear on consumer products. Rather, the brothers became multibillionaires by controlling oil and gas production, paper products, derivatives trading in multiple commodities, engineering services, and much more. At first interested in influencing electoral politics to aid Koch Industries' profitability, Charles eventually expanded the corporate presence inside state legislatures and the U.S. Congress partly for ideological reasons. Labeling Charles' political philosophy is impossible, but there is definitely a kinship to libertarianism, with an emphasis on capitalist free markets untrammeled by government intervention. Charles opposed almost every policy of President Barack Obama and then battled various Donald Trump initiatives for entirely different reasons. Leonard is especially skilled at explicating the politics as well as at delineating how Koch Industries dominated industrial sectors, with natural gas extraction via fracking a timely recent example. This impressively researched and well-rendered book also serves as a biography of Charles Koch, with Leonard providing an evenhanded treatment of the tycoon. Leonard's work is on par with Steve Coll's Private Empire and even Ida Tarbell's enduring classic The History of the Standard Oil Company. A landmark book.

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Starred review from August 1, 2019

Investigative business reporter Leonard (The Meat Racket) provides a far-reaching history from the late 1960s onward of the privately owned Koch Industries and its role in tearing away America's New Deal consensus. Depicting Charles Koch's control of the company as complete, Leonard says Koch, using a system called market-based management, has molded the company to mirror his libertarian philosophy. According to the author, after some acquisition missteps, brushes with government regulators, and a family schism, Koch Industries became successful by playing to its strengths of reacting to change quickly, taking a long-term view, and sourcing information from multiple channels. Leonard details the company's commodities trading, expansion efforts, and union busting. He shows how Koch's political power has intimidated elected officials, elected friendly ones, and influenced both tax and environmental policy to its advantage. VERDICT Based on six years of research and with a fast-paced writing style that interweaves multiple stories, this illuminating work on the exceedingly influential Koch and his company will be welcomed by all readers of business or politics. Leonard does for Koch what Andrew Sorkin's Too Big To Fail did for the 2008 financial crisis.--Lawrence Maxted, Gannon Univ. Lib., Erie, PA

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

July 1, 2019
Ask the average American what, exactly, Koch Industries does, and they may be uncertain. Energy? Building materials? Paper products? All of the above, and much more. There is hardly an aspect of the American manufacturing and consumer marketplace that can't be linked back to a Koch company. And yet, the full schematic of the infrastructure of this business behemoth is one of corporate America's abiding secrets, and that's just the way the notoriously reticent Charles Koch likes it. His was a vision based on an unrelenting drive, an uncanny market sense, and an often-unscrupulous pursuit of untold wealth. Leonard covers the specific properties of the energy industry that was, and is, the foundation of the Koch family fortune, as well as Charles Koch's singular management philosophy, which propelled the company's massive expansion into a diverse field of products and services. Ultimately, Leonard's intricately developed and extensively researched history of the Koch empire is a colossal corporate biography that sheds important light on this closely guarded enterprise while simultaneously scrutinizing the nefarious underpinnings of American economic policies and practices.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)