BP bought one company after another and then relentlessly fired employees and cut costs. It skipped safety procedures, pumped toxic chemicals back into the ground, and let equipment languish, even while Browne claimed a new era of environmentally sustainable business as his own. For a while the strategy worked, making BP one of the most profitable corporations in the world. Then it all began to unravel, in felony convictions for environmental crimes and in one deadly accident after another. Employees and regulators warned that BP's problems, unfixed, were spinning out of control, that another disaster--bigger and deadlier--was inevitable. Nobody was listening.

Having reported on business and the energy industry for nearly a decade, Abrahm Lustgarten uses interviews with key executives, former government investigators, and whistle-blowers along with his exclusive access to BP's internal documents and emails to weave a spellbinding investigative narrative of hubris and greed well before the gulf oil spill.

Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 03/26/2012
ISBN: 9780393081626
Pages: 384
Weight: 1.60lbs
Size: 9.40h x 6.60w x 1.40d

Review Citations: Library Journal 10/15/2011 pg. 62
Publishers Weekly 12/19/2011
Library Journal 02/01/2012 pg. 84
Kirkus Reviews 03/01/2012
Booklist 03/01/2012 pg. 33
Choice 09/01/2012