KOCHLAND

Superb... Among the best books ever written about an American corporation... Not since Andrew Ross Sorkin's landmark Too Big to Fail (2009) have I said this about a book, but Kochland warrants it: If you're in business, this is something you need to read.

Leonard's superb investigations and even-handed, clear-eyed reportage stand out... American capitalism at its most successful and domineering is at the center of this sweeping history of a much-vilified company.

In 'Kochland,' Christopher Leonard has done an impressive job of breaking through that secrecy and getting insiders as well as outcasts to talk. As a result, 'Kochland' is the most definitive account yet of how one of America's richest and most powerful families amassed its fortune... "Kochland" is the third major book to explore the Kochs' influence... but it's the first to investigate fully the companies that are the source of that power.

Leonard's visionary, decade-spanning, and heart-rending investigation into the Koch Empire is indispensable not just for understanding the rise of corporate power in America, but for understanding America itself. Kochland will take its place alongside Chernow's Titan and Coll's Private Empire as one of the great accounts of American capitalism.

UK: Simon & Schuster UK ; Chinese (SI): Citic

Impressive... Telling this story as well as Kochland does is harder than it looks.

[A] detail-packed, incisive look into the modern worlds of American commerce and politics... Leonard goes a long way toward lifting the veils surrounding Koch to correct and expand the public record... In many ways, 'Kochland' is as sprawling as the company and the family it covers.... but the overall picture comes through loud and clear.

Today's ranking on Amazon (Aug 30, 2019two weeks after publication): #1 in Economic History (Books) #1 in Oil & Energy Industry (Books) #2 in Income Inequality

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.

With deep reporting and narrative flair, Leonard has rendered a revealing portrait of the Koch family as ruthless businessmen and savvy political operatives who quietly built an empire and defined the face of American capitalism and its hold on Washington over the last fifty years.

KOCHLAND is longliste for the Financial Times Business Book Award

A Robert Caro-like narrative of business and political power with a brilliant, ruthless, and fascinating monopolist at its center. Leonard devoted eight years to this gem of a book, seeking to understand the mysterious Charles Koch and the Goliath he has taken a half century to construct.

Deeply and authoritatively reported... [Kochland] marshals a huge amount of information and uses it to help solve two enduring mysteries: how the Kochs got so rich, and how they used that fortune to buy off American action on climate change.

If you want a crash course in the evolution of postmodern capitalism over the last five decades read Kochland.

Kochland is a dazzling feat of investigative reporting and epic narrative writing, a tour de force that takes the reader deep inside the rise of a vastly powerful family corporation that has come to influence American workers, markets, elections, and the very ideas debated in our public square. Leonard's work is fair and meticulous, even as it reveals the Kochs as industrial Citizens Kane of our time.

A landmark book... on par with Steve Coll's Private Empire and even Ida Tarbell's enduring classic The History of the Standard Oil Company.