Review: 'Private Empire' takes compelling look at ExxonMobil

— -- Writing a comprehensive, compelling book about the world's largest and maybe most influential private corporation is a daunting task.

A list of authors who could succeed at such a task would include Steve Coll based on his half-dozen previous books. And, based on Private Empire, his inclusion would be justified.

Lots of books have appeared previously about gigantic oil companies. A few of those books have qualified as excellent. Coll's is arguably the best. Why?

•Because he achieves admirable breadth and admirable depth simultaneously, a difficult proposition for an author.

•Because his mini-biographies of key players inside ExxonMobil and outside the corporation are satisfying. They personalize the narrative, a vital quality in a book so lengthy and, by definition, complex. (Coll's "selected cast of characters" near the beginning of the book contains 57 names. And that is just the "selected" cast.)

•Because Coll offers large dollops of history, but focuses the book on contemporary occurrences, starting in 1989, with the environmentally catastrophic wreck of the oil tanker Exxon Valdez near the coast of Alaska. (In Chapter 28, Coll also deals with ExxonMobil's role in the Deepwater Horizon Gulf of Mexico disaster during 2010. British Petroleum took the brunt of the criticism, as it should have, but ExxonMobil was part of the problem.)

•Because, although ExxonMobil is American-based, it is essentially a stateless world power, meaning Coll had to cross lots of international borders to nail down information. That's an extremely demanding undertaking, especially in nations downright hostile to journalists —Russia, Iraq, Indonesia, Venezuela, Chad, Equatorial Guinea, Saudi Arabia and Nigeria, to mention just some of many.

Coll is a veteran of the Washington Post who now serves as president of the New America Foundation, which describes itself as a non-partisan public policy institute based in Washington, D.C.

He also writes regularly for The New Yorker magazine, a paragon of in-depth journalism. Explanatory journalism found in book form is especially meaningful circa 2012, as in-depth reporting diminishes in most newsrooms —The New Yorker is a rare exception. In the care of a skilled journalist, time equals truth, or at least approximates truth. Books usually afford the most time.

The evidence gathered by Coll leads to much criticism of ExxonMobil, but he tempers the tone of the book so that it falls short of unrelenting expose. There is a great deal to admire within ExxonMobil— after all, locating oil and other energy resources, extracting it, shipping it, selling it and turning a profit fills lots of needs; no oil company executive created those needs.

Coll is able to admire the professional skills and zeal within the corporation while simultaneously sometimes criticizing the ruthlessness and lawlessness that sometimes become apparent.

Memorable scenes and anecdotes abound. A favorite is set during the presidency of George W. Bush, himself an oil man who critics claim tended to let ExxonMobil do whatever it pleased within the energy realm, no matter how harmful to the United States.

Yet, during his 2006 State of the Union speech to the U.S. Congress, Bush mentioned the desirability of less oil and gas consumption, so that renewable forms of energy might thrive.