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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2019 * WINNER OF THE J ANTHONY LUKAS WORK-IN-PROGRESS AWARD * FINANCIAL TIMES' BEST BOOKS OF 2019 * NPR FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2019 * FINALIST FOR THE FINACIAL TIMES/MCKINSEY BUSINESS BOOK OF 2019 * KIRKUS REVIEWS BEST BOOKS OF 2019 * SCHOOL LIBRARY JOURNAL BEST BOOKS OF 2019

"Superb...Among the best books ever written about an American corporation." -- Bryan Burrough, The New York Times Book Review

Just as Steve Coll told the story of globalization through ExxonMobil and Andrew Ross Sorkin told the story of Wall Street excess through Too Big to Fail , Christopher Leonard's Kochland uses the extraordinary account of how one of the biggest private companies in the world grew to be that big to tell the story of modern corporate America.

The annual revenue of Koch Industries is bigger than that of Goldman Sachs, Facebook, and US Steel combined. Koch is everywhere: from the fertilizers that make our food to the chemicals that make our pipes to the synthetics that make our carpets and diapers to the Wall Street trading in all these commodities. But few people know much about Koch Industries and that's because the billionaire Koch brothers have wanted it that way.

For five decades, CEO Charles Koch has kept Koch Industries quietly operating in deepest secrecy, with a view toward very, very long-term profits. He's a genius businessman: patient with earnings, able to learn from his mistakes, determined that his employees develop a reverence for free-market ruthlessness, and a master disrupter. These strategies made him and his brother David together richer than Bill Gates.

But there's another side to this story. If you want to understand how we killed the unions in this country, how we widened the income divide, stalled progress on climate change, and how our corporations bought the influence industry, all you have to do is read this book.

Seven years in the making, 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 ).

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

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

Publishers Weekly Review

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. (Aug.)

CHOICE Review

Power. Secrecy. Control. And, of course, profit. These words thread their way through Kochland, Leonard's brilliant history of the half-century since Charles Koch inherited leadership of Koch Industries and built it into a colossus. That Leonard (a respected business reporter) does not describe Koch as self-righteous shows his evenhandedness as he details Koch's efforts both to limit government action to the support of private property, especially that of the rich and influential, and to manage employees as if they exist only to generate profits. Koch's massive funding for think tanks, public relations, university programs, and lobbying has influenced national conversations and policies, while teams of lawyers have mitigated legal challenges resulting from environmental and safety violations. Vivid portraits of a wide array of people and their lives, both inside and outside the company, draw the reader through the high-powered, increasingly global drama that still centers on Wichita, Kansas. Leonard excels at concise, accurate contextualization that explains everything from economic and financial intricacies to combat over climate change. Exhaustive research and compelling writing combine in this page-turner, illuminating as much about the US and its recent economic and political history as about Koch Industries. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals; general readers. --Pamela W. Laird, emerita, University of Colorado Denver

Booklist Review

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.--Carol Haggas Copyright 2019 Booklist

Kirkus Book Review

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. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.