On "Private Empire" by Steve Coll ****

This exploration of the culture and recent (last twenty-five years) history of Exxon did not turn out to be as interesting to me as Coll's book on the Bin Ladens. I think that may be because the book seemed to sprawl so far and wide like a discrete set of articles rather than like a single narrative or a singular argument. Still, I suppose that's in keeping with Coll's point--that Exxon is wide ranging, sprawling, a world power not unlike any nation-state.

And indeed, Exxon's loyalties, as the book makes clear, are chiefly to itself and its shareholders. At one point, the former CEO even states as much, when asked why Exxon doesn't do more to help out with energy costs and jobs in the United States: our responsibilities are to the shareholders not to any particular nation. And yet, ironically, Exxon, when it needs to be, is an American company, happy to take advantage of tax discounts, U.S. military assistance, and U.S. diplomatic assistance. I can't say multinational companies come off looking very nice in Coll's rendering.

The book begins with an account of the Exxon Valdez spill, an event that would shake Exxon badly and that would lead to a heavy focus on safety, in an attempt to never repeat such an incident. It would also lead--as would many other similar events--to a long set of court cases that Exxon would appeal and appeal and appeal until penalties were rejected or reduced to a negligible amount for the damage done. Most galling of all in this regard would be how Exxon, while agreeing to pay for damages to water supply and property values a leak at a gas station caused--but not any kind of penalty beyond the actual physical damage--would eventually even contest what physical damages it agreed to pay. Another lawsuit from people in Indonesia would sit in courts for such a long time that the people who brought the suit would die before seeing any benefit. If you're a regular person, forget ever getting anything from corporate bigwigs.

Other chapters focus on how Exxon works with powerbrokers in Africa, Indonesia, and Russia. They bring out how difficult it is to show a concern for human rights in nations where the rule of law is often that of the local rebel group, where who's in charge might change from day to day, where pirates range freely.

Why bother drilling for gas in such locations given the risks? Wall Street. Exxon and other oil companies continually have to show that they have replaced or surpassed the number of oil reserves they've used up or lost in a given year. This means looking for oil in bad places, merging with other oil companies, playing shady with the numbers (counting certain technologies Wall Street doesn't count as reserves).

Coll starts with Valdez and ends with the BP Gulf spill of 2010. In between, Exxon merges with Mobil; liquified natural gas comes to be a resource of growing importance; and tar sand oil begins to be profitable. There's a lot here to chew on.

On "The Bin Ladens" by Steve Coll *****

The story of the Bin Ladens it turns out is the story of modern Saudi Arabia, of the rise of that nation in the early 1900s to our present day. I much enjoyed especially the early portions of the kingdom's and the family's history. Muhammed Bin Laden, the family's patriarch, was not even a Saudi but an orphan from Yemen who knew how to work and did it well, first establishing himself with American companies and then starting his own company. As a company owner, he was a man who, when he or his company lacked the skills needed to do a job, took the job anyway--and found ways to contract out the job to people who did know how. And he was a man blessed with the good fortune of having the favor of the Saudi royal family, for it was through his work on construction projects for them that he would make his billions.

He would also have fifty-four children. As a fairly devout Muslim, who would help to refurbish the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, he could and would take four wives, as allowed in Islamic tradition. (What strikes me as interesting in this is that the men often take not just four wives in a lifetime but four wives at a time. Divorce seems fairly common, so that, where in the United States, we have serial monogamy because of rampant divorce, among some circles in the Islamic world you have essentially serial polygamy.)

Those children would be bequeathed a huge fortune when Mohammed died in a place crash. Mohammed's oldest son Salem would then take the reigns of the family and the family businesses. Salem, as the book shows, was a natural salesman--and, as many salesmen are, a kind of party animal with a tremendous sense of humor. Salem's own recklessness would lead to another tragedy in a plane twenty years later.

Under Bakr, Salem's half-brother, the family businesses would move toward being more professional, more corporate--or so, that was my impression from the book. At this point, the book becomes a bit drier as a result, though still quite fascinating. For this is also the time when Osama begins to create problems for the Saudis and for his own family. And perhaps one of the most interesting themes throughout the whole book is the way in which this one family straddles the Muslim and Western worlds, how some are very devout, conservative Muslims, some Muslims in seeming name only, and most Muslims somewhere in the middle, each of them donning different personalities as necessary in and out of Saudi Arabia.

And finally there are the Bin Ladens themselves, the awkwardness that one black sheep family member can create for all the others, the loyalty to one another, the devotion to the royal family and to Islam itself. This is as full and textured a portrait one could expect in six hundred pages, and so far the best of the four historical books I've read that have come out of our obsession with September 11, save perhaps the 9/11 Commission Report, itself an amazing work.