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“Kochland is a corporate history, lucidly told.”
— New York Times
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“Jacques Roy provides a masterful narration…Roy’s low-key professorial tone eases the listener through a highly complex market-based business portrait. It would be challenging to find a clearer discussion of how dark money may wield profound influence on American politics.”
— AudioFile
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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.”
— New Yorker
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“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.”
— Washington Post
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“Superb…Among the best books ever written about an American corporation.”
— New York Times Book Review
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"A massively reported deep dive.”
— Kirkus Reviews
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'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.'
— Steve Coll, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Private Empire
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'Christopher 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. Leonard’s book will take its place alongside Chernow’s Titan and Coll’s Private Empire as one of the great accounts of American capitalism.'
— Jesse Eisinger, author of The Chickenshit Club
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'Christopher Leonard has produced an investigative feat: a hugely readable, entirely original, magisterial work on one of the most important subjects of our time – the weirdly cultish, terrifyingly successful empire built all-but invisibly by the billionaire sphinx Charles Koch.'
— Steve LeVine, author of The Oil and the Glory
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A landmark book....A massively reported deep dive into the unparalleled corporate industrial giant Koch Industries....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.’
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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.’
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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.’
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This page-turning exposé reveals the full extent of the Koch brothers’ influence on American capitalism.’
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If you want a crash course in the evolution of postmodern capitalism over the last five decades read Kochland....Leonard's study is exhaustive and engaging.’
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