Rachel Maddow

The author offers a dark, serpentine, riveting tour of the unimaginably lucrative and corrupt oil-and-gas industry. With her trademark black humor, Maddow exposes the greed and incompetence of Big Oil and Gas.

Corrupted Democracy, Rogue State Russia, and the Richest, Most Destructive Industry on Earth

Blowout

Melody Izard

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Oil. Corrupt? Yes. Unimaginably lucrative? Of course. But, the enemy of democracy? Blowout is the oil and gas industry as we've never seen it before, as told by America's most incisive political journalist, Rachel Maddow. A blackly comic journey from Washington to Siberia, to deep within the earth's crust and the icy Arctic seas, it reveals is not just the greed and incompetence of Big Oil and Gas but why the Russian government hacked the 2016 U.S. election. This is our final wake-up call: to stop subsidizing oil and gas, to fight for transparency, and to check the influence of the world's most destructive industry before it destroys our democracy 'It takes enormous talent to balance brutal honesty with scorching wit. Rachel Maddow has it in spades... Each page in Blowout is a revelation into the depth of corruption and greed that is infused into the international economy' David Lammy, MP

Sahi K

Update 3/15/21 - Yay Rachel won the Grammy for this audiobook!!! No surprise there coz this audio and her narration is just spectacular 😍😍 

I’ve had this book on my TBR since the day it was announced and none of my excitement diminished when I was rejected for the ARC. It only meant I had to wait for the release day and I’m glad I did, because now I got the opportunity to both read the book and listen to the audiobook narrated by Rachel herself, which was an absolutely riveting experience.

If you have read any of my reviews before, particularly the non fiction ones, you know I’m fairly liberal, so it should not come as a surprise that I’m also a fan of Rachel Maddow’s show. And I may have to preface this review by saying that you’ll really enjoy the experience of reading or listening to this book if you like Rachel’s style of narration on her show. She is witty and snarky, but also has this meandering way of storytelling in her show everyday, where you are initially wondering where she’s going with it but ultimately she’ll draw a very full picture for you to understand. And that’s exactly how this book is written. 

It’s signature Rachel and I feel that you may not fully appreciate it if you are unfamiliar with her reporting. However meandering the writing may feel, she manages to give excellent historical context to the events that are being explained and the major players who are responsible for them, and even if the timeline is not always linear, I wasn’t really ever confused. The book is also full of information (and I really mean lots of information) and it can feel overwhelming for atleast the first quarter of the book, but once you get the hang of it, you become familiar with what it’s all about and then it unfolds like a very interesting and thrilling story spanning decades. Beginning with the Oil boom in the US in the late 19th century and ending with some conclusions of the Mueller report, this really is the saga of the Oil and Gas industry across the globe (and years) and how it has changed everything.

It’s an undeniable reality that our current way of life depends a lot on the Oil and Gas industry. The use of fossil fuels have changed the way we live, but it has also meant the industry has become a major power player across the world in a way that threatens geopolitical stability but also the daily lives of people living across the US. The events, statements, and consequences that Rachel explains in the book show us an industry that is consumed by its greed for increasing its oil/gas production, it’s lust for money and power at absolutely any cost - as long as their bottom line is served, the rest of the world can go to hell. It is equal parts horrifying and amusing, unbelievable but also kinda obvious, and particularly scary at times because I couldn’t as a reader figure out if there was a way out of all the mess.

And when we are talking about Oil and Gas, it’s impossible to avoid the major power players - the industry giants like ExxonMobil, the oil rich and utterly dependent on it countries like Russia, Ukraine, Nigeria, Equatorial Guinea or even similar states in the US like Oklahoma, Texas, North Dakota etc. The way the companies permeate every part of the power structure of a country (or state) and then do their business with impunity, while simultaneously not caring at all about the common people’s lives they’ve put at stake is terrifying to read about. Rachel particularly concentrates on the story of Oklahoma, it’s history and it’s dependence on the industry, how the governance of the whole state became essentially a puppet of the fracking industry masters and nothing could be legislated without their approval. It’s also a story of the power of democracy and people and public servants, and their resilience in the face of the brute force attack of money and power from all sides. 

And on a larger scale is the story of Russia - how it’s abundance of oil and gas could have propelled it to a global scale on better terms, if not for the infamous Resource curse meeting an authoritarian leader with paranoid tendencies. The story of Putin, ExxonMobil (and Rex Tillerson), the Oil companies and their owners in Russia and the few people who were brave enough to oppose the leader plays out like a gangster thriller, and while I was initially unsure what was the point of it all, by the end I realized that as long as the industry players work hand in hand with dictators and let them interfere in global democracies with impunity, the world is only gonna end up in more chaos. 

There are quite a few important figures whom we get to know more about in the book along with their beliefs and methods and motivations, and it was fascinating to see how the common thread across all of them was greed and some kind of narcissism. Whether it is Rex Tillerson; Putin and his right hand, the head of Russia’s biggest oil company Igor Sechin; the eternal President and his son of Equatorial Guinea; Oklahoma’s own business tycoons like Harold Hamm and Aubrey McClendon; one thing they all have is loads of money and power acquired through Oil and Gas, and one thing they all want is the freedom to exploit the nature with impunity and earn boatloads more of money. 

But we also get to know some unlikely heroes in the story - someone like Austin Holland, a seismologist working for the Oklahoma Geological Survey who is probably one of the key persons responsible for bringing the damage done by fracking to light; journalists like Ken Silverstein and Peter Maass who brought forth the atrocities of the leader of Equatorial Guinea and his son’s profligate tendencies; and also someone like Boris Nemtsov, who had the gall to make public the extent of Putin’s corruption and had to pay with his life. There are many more, and the “Sources” section of the book is full of information about them and their work.

I probably have a lot more to say but I I’ll conclude my review by saying that it’s an important book which talks about one of the most influential industries of our times, and I highly recommend it. Rachel is neutral for the most part, giving us all the information so that we can form our own opinions, but her sarcasm does come out at times which I enjoyed. I also think the best way to enjoy this book is reading while simultaneously listening to the audio, because her narration brings a lot of life to what can feel like a very long story. I had fun listening to it, I also felt shocked and terrified and hopeless. But Rachel ends with a slightly hopeful note, remarking that it’s always possible to course correct but we (which includes people and government) need to have the courage and conviction to standup for democratic principles and the importance of transparency.

Blowout Corrupted Democracy, Rogue State Russia, and the Richest, Most Destructive Industry on Earth

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