Book Description
The life that inspired the major motion picture The Aviator, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and directed by Martin Scorsese.
Howard Hughes has always fascinated the public with his mixture of secrecy, dashing lifestyle, and reclusiveness. This is the book that breaks through the image to get at the man. 80 photographs. Originally published under the title Empire: The Life, Legend, and Madness of Howard Hughes.
Customer Reviews:
Great Book, But A Little Dated.......2005-05-27
This is the only Howard Hughes biography that I have read, so I can only discuss in it absolute terms.
I thought it was facinating, and that the level of technical and business transaction detail was right on the mark. The author also did a great job of presenting information, rather than going off on his own interpretation of the greater meaning in it all.
The only reason that I docked it a star is that it need to have an Update written that fills in some of the gaps of what transpired after the book was written. When the book ends, there are still open questions around several lawsuits, investigations, business transactions, and the inheritance. I would think most, if not all, of these issues have been resolved in the 25 years since the book was published, but we are left wondering what the resolutions were.
All in all, a great and gripping read.
Howard Hughes His life and madness.......2005-03-24
Great book. Get's a little technical when taling about aircraft. But I consider it a must read for fans of biographies.
Unparalleled research on Hughes life........2005-02-24
Howard Hughes is hot right now. Just like John Nash of "A Beautiful Mind"-fame was a few years ago. The movie "The Aviator" has been nominated for more Oscars than any other. And, after seeing the movie everyone wants to know more about Howard Hughes and attempt to crack the mystery that was his life.
There is no question Hughes' character was mythical. He was part Chuck Yeager, Donald Trump, Hugh Heffner, Steven Spielberg, and a genuine madman all combined in a strikingly handsome 6 foot 4 inches body frame. After reading this book, however, you may find that Hughes was ultimately more successful at creating a myth than anything else. Looking at his private life and business ventures, you will conclude that he was a tragic failure.
This book has to be the most detailed biography on Hughes. The authors conducted a Herculean research effort that entailed the examination of a quarter million pages of records and documents, and reproducing over 50,000 pages of them. They traveled to numerous cities in the U.S. and Japan to conduct this research. As a result of this unparalleled research, the authors wrote a tightly written 600 page book in extremely small font. Thus, it is not a quick read. But, it is incredibly informative and fascinating.
The scope and the details on Howard Hughes business and legal dealings is extremely thorough. And, you get a real sense of who he was, the way he thought, the way he mismanaged every business enterprises he engaged in. Hughes was obsessive about so many things. In business, he developed a weird set of obsessions that included not paying any taxes, becoming a major airline owner at all costs, becoming an aircraft manufacturer and also a defense contractor at all costs. For him, manufacturing an aircraft for the Department of Defense became a lifelong obsession. Contrary to what the outside World may believe, Hughes was not a brilliant businessman. Much to the contrary, he was really a madman. For every dollar he did not pay or save in taxes, he actually lost a dollar fifty or so. Thus, his various tax schemes were disasters from an after tax return standpoint. He also did not have the organizational, and managerial talent to pull off any of his grandiose obsessions to economic fruition. Hughes would certainly have become much richer being just a regular Trust baby supported by the extraordinary capital generated by the company created by his father, the Hughes Tool Company. The latter made a fortune by developing the most advanced oil drilling head. It became so successful as to become nearly a monopoly throughout the entire worldwide oil industry. This invention created the fortune that financed all of Howard Hughes business fantasies and fiascos. However, if he had done so [just become a Trust baby] he would not have become Howard Hughes and offer us the spectacle of one of the most grandiose, grotesque, and tragic life of modern times.
The authors also covers in detail Hughes social life, movie producing years, and his long and irreversible descent into madness. This part is easier reading than the legal business disputes. The psychological profile that emerges is almost unbelievable.
The book does an excellent job of debunking several myths about Hughes. One of them is Hughes the world class philanthropist. Indeed, he is known has having given during his lifetime a fortune to medical research. Well during his lifetime, his creation of The Howard Hughes Medical Institute was nothing more than a leveraged lease tax avoidance mechanism. Most of his donations funding this nonprofit entity went back to him in the form of lease payments on properties rented from various Hughes corporations at above market rents by this institute. Nowadays, the IRS never would grant such a research institute any tax-exempt status. In the Appendices, the authors do an excellent job of documenting the cash flows associated with this tax avoidance scheme. Almost, zero % of the donation to this institute went to medical research.
At the end of the book, the "Chronology" is an excellent timeline map to get an overview of Hughes life. I found myself referring to it constantly to get my bearings of where was I in this convoluted story. Did he incur his first major mental breakdown before or after his spectacular Congressional hearings where he outwitted and demolished his Congressional nemesis? Amazingly enough, a quick reference to the Chronology confirms that he incurred his mental breakdown before the hearings.
Also, the Epilogue is brilliant. It fully captures the essence and drama of this life and provides a coherent thematic summary of this 600 page book.
In any case, if you really want to find out more about Hughes this is the book.
The real Howard Hughes.......2005-02-01
Great book, with many great details.
This book will tell you all you really need to know about this great man.
The latest movie about Howard Hughes is nothing compared to this book. What was Hollywood thinking when they decided to make this movie? It did not say anything about his Vegas ventures, which was a crucial time in his life. If one knew about his time in the Flamingo hotel, it would have been easy to relate to his crazyness, mentality and thinking. Nothing also was mentioned in the movie about his voyages around the world, which started it all, and his life after his aviation follies. I know the movie was called "The Aviator", but if you did not know anything about Howard before you saw the movie, then all you would think was that he was some crazy aviator who wasted his time building a giant aircraft that was never used for military or commercial purposes, dated a movie star and was always concerned that the US government was out to distroy him. (Well, the government tried really hard!!)
Who knows, maybe Airbus engineers had Howard Hughes in mind when they build their latest aircraft, the giant A380.
Mr. Hughes will be forever the pioneer who started it all.
In this book though,his life and his legacy are well preserved.
It is very well written, it tells use about his dramatic life, his eratic lifestyle and behavior, his connections to everything that was going on in the US at the time, and his constant drive for perfection. Hero or not, he was sometimes crazy but also brilliant.
If one really wants to know who Howard Hughes really was, all questions will be answered here. This book will tell you everything.
Very long but really good read.
Meticulously researched.......2005-01-26
I've read this book and Peter Brown's book. There is a definite difference. Barlett obviously did his research and it shows for example in the amount of pages devoted to many of Hughes' business transactions (e.g., TWA, Spruce Goose, Vegas properties) - at a certain point, however, I got tired and would skim through these dense passages. I was more interested in Hughes on a personal level and most of the book centered on Hughes in his later years, the misdeeds of his aides/associates, and his intricate business dealings. However, I don't think this detracts much from the overall book which does provide a clear, tragic portrait of this fascinating figure.
If you want a book that emphasazies Hughes' personal life (including more on his earlier years), I would suggest the Peter Brown book. Brown's book was published more recently and contains new information (including a new revelation on Hughes' mental condition) not included in Barlett's.
Amazon.com
Though he rose to fame after a record-setting flight around the world and the construction of an unprecedented fleet of airplanes, aerospace industry icon Howard Hughes wasted millions of dollars in production, swindled taxpayers through self-serving philanthropy projects and regularly lied to stockholders. In his spare time he worked for Joe McCarthy, was an avid supporter of segregation and nearly destroyed himself through drugs. In this biography of Hughes, authors David Barlett and James Steele reveal the dark, often unlawful, existence that can accompany an American success story.
Product Description
Howard Hughes lived one of the greatest, most heroic, misunderstood, mysterious, bizarre, and tragic lives in American history. In this brilliantly documented biography, the mythology that surrounded that life is disentangled from the truth. Hughes had always been different. Certainly his riches set him apart, but he was also tough. Orphaned and a millionaire at eighteen, Hughes repudiated his relatives, seized control of the Hughes Tool Company, the linchpin of his fortune, and went on to become a flamboyant movie producer, holder of many world aviation records, principal owner of Trans World Airlines, a critically important defense contractor, Hollywood's most pursued and elusive bachelor, and partner of the United States government. This is an epic biography of an epic figure who bestrode the world like a colossus yet could not master himself.
Customer Reviews:
Unshrouds the mystery with facts, not speculations.......2005-04-23
The Life, Legend, and Madness offers an in-depth view into the secretive life of Howard Hughes. Unbiased in its writing, the book focuses on all of Hughes accomplishments and successes, as well as some of the darker aspects of his life. After reading this book, one can really see that Hughes is one of the few "larger than life" characters that ever lived.
Hughes played an integral role in shaping this country, a role unknown to many of today's younger generations. Donald Barlett and James Steele do an amazing job detailing both his accomplishments and private life. Some of his endeavors are less obvious today than others, such as helping transform Las Vegas into the resort town we know today. Many people are unfamiliar with the Hughes Medical Institute or the creations from the Hughes Aircraft Company. Although the book does show his odd lifestyle behind the darkened windows and closed doors, it is fair in that it also accurately focuses on his important business dealings.
The popular movie "The Aviator" seems to be scripted largely from the first half of this book. To fully appreciate the movie, I recommend reading this particular book first. Not only will it help clarify references that may slip by in the movie, but this book shows that Hughes was much more than a movie producer who flirted with Hollywood's divas of the day. He was a master engineer, expert businessman, and defender of Democracy (he furiously fought Communists). Innovative people like Hughes is what America is all about.
Excellent Insight into the Life and Empire of Howard Hughes.......2004-12-01
After reading other books on Howard Hughes, I thought this book would be a waste of my time since I'd "read everything else" but little did I know that this book went into such detail of his life, exposing in great detail specifics that other books briefly mentioned.
Howard Hughes, Naked.......2004-06-05
The story of Howard Hughes, told superbly in this classic bio, is simply magnetic. How else could you describe a tale that begins with young Howard Robard Hughes, Jr. being born into one of Texas's wealthiest oil families (his father's company, Hughes Tool Company, held a virtual monopoly on drill-bits for many years), moving to Califoria to become a movie mogul, pioneering aviation, heading TWA, and then slipping into degenerative obsessive madness that rendered him completely in the hands of his manipulative underlings. Thus in this book we confront both the young, energetic Hughes (romantically linked to both Jane Russell and Katharine Hepburn) and the old, sick hughes - a nudist who left his hair and fingernails uncut for years, chronicly addicted to codeine, flitting between vacuum-sealed hotel rooms in diffent countries (Bahamas, Nicaragua, Toronto, London, etc.), yet whose name continued to command terror and respect among presidents and governors.
As I read this book, there were many Hughes habits that I found deeply endearing, even as the weird details mounted. How can you not like a guy who, in the pre-VCR era, decided to buy the local Nevada TV station, just so they'd play the movies he wanted? Who - upon installing his home entertainment system - had an obsessive-compulsive need to watch the epic 1968 thriller "Ice Station Zebra" over and over again? (It's a good movie, after all.) Who bought up half of the real estate of Nevada in a doomed expectation of a world gold shortage? Or who lent his name to the ocean-dredging vessel, Glomar Explorer, to aid the CIA's covert attempts to refloat a Soviet sub? And there was something genuinely visionary about the way he built his aircraft and electronics empires. Indeed, despite the piles of carefully-compiled evidence of financial disasters at TWA, RKO, Air West and Summa Corporation, somehow I want to believe that Hughes was not the bungling sicko that emerges from these pages, but so what if he was, the story remains magnificent.
As a postscript, every time you see a DirectTV advertisement, remember that it used to be a Hughes company.
The Demise of an Empire.......2003-05-01
Donald Bartlett and James Steel's book, "Empire: The Life, Legend, and Madness of Howard Hughes" is an excellent example of journalistic reporting converted into book form; the book is simply fascinating to read. The authors accomplish the gargantuan task of separating fact from fiction in the very complex life of Howard Hughes. "Empire" is impeccably researched and documented; It is a bona fide biography that reads more like fiction than real life-such was the world of Howard Hughes.
"Empire" traces the rise and tragic fall of Howard Hughes; a man who wore many hats, he was an aviator, Hollywood movie producer, Las Vegas hotel/casino owner ... and a recluse. For one brief shining moment, Hughes was considered one of America's premier aviators, breaking flying records, but then falling out of grace with government and the aviation industry for breaking contract deadlines. In the long run, Howard Hughes would become a grand failure in the world of big business.
Bartlett and Steel show the reader a man who had everything to live for, good looks, fame, fortune, power and prestige, but he was unable to triumph over his social and physical phobias that led to psychological, emotional, and physical illnesses and to his final descent into the dwellings of the insane. Hughes' deep mistrust of all people-even family, worked against him and led to his demise and the lose of his billion dollar empire by the very people whose job it was to safeguard him and his empire.
By the time I finished reading "Empire: The Life, Legend, and Madness of Howard Hughes, I was much more accepting of my status as a non wealthy individual. Although Howard Hughes had everything a man could possibly wish for, he was underprivileged in peace of mind.... The authors do a superb job in separating fact from myth in the life of Howard Hughes. The book is worth reading.
The best book on Howard Hughes.......2001-07-24
"Empire: The Life, Legend, and Madness of Howard Hughes" is indeed an empire within itself. This book manages to expose the life of a very seceretive and private man of power who lived in his own unique way in the world. An incredible book about an incredible man...
Average customer rating:
- Best book about the topic!
- Only if the world reads this, truth will shine so will peace
- Lies, Lies, Lies. The Guerillas were Palestinians!
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BLOOD IN ZION: How the Jewish Guerrillas Drove the British Out of Palestine
Saul Zadka
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The Birth of the Irgun Zvai Leumi: The Jewish Resistance Movement
ASIN: 1857531361 |
Book Description
On the first day of February 1944 an organisation of Palestinian Jews issued a proclamation to the Jewish Nation. It called for the immediate transfer of power in the land of Israel to a provisional Jewish government. The Irgun Zvai Leumi (National Military Organisation) then launched an intensive guerilla campaign against the British on a scale never before conducted by a Jewish organisation in modern times.
Led by Menachem Begin, a future Prime Minister of Israel, the Irgun blew up buildings, sabotaged roads, raided military bases, robbed banks and attacked strategic targeta at home and abroad.
Was this campaign a major factor in the ending of the British mandate in Palestine and the founding of the Jewish nation? How did the intensive propaganda campaign win support in the Unites States? In Blood in Zion Saul Zadka examines the efforts made by the British Government to combat insurgency and the motives and the actions of the Irgun. It seeks to bridge the gap between distorted fact and historical truth and to give a clear impression of the Irgun's campaign of violence and the British government's attempts to thwart it until the mandate ended in 1948.
Customer Reviews:
Best book about the topic!.......2000-09-19
This is simply the best book about the Israeli-Palestinian topic. great job by the author!!!
Only if the world reads this, truth will shine so will peace.......1998-07-22
This book reveals all the dirty work that has been commited by these Guerrillas.
Lies, Lies, Lies. The Guerillas were Palestinians!.......1998-03-13
Jews were under the british protection. This author is a dreamer.!
Amazon.com
Author Philip K. Howard returns with the same storytelling style and supreme reasonableness that made his first book, The Death of Common Sense, such a smash hit in 1995. He begins The Lost Art of Drawing the Line by noting the damage predatory litigation has done to the communal fabric of the United States: "Social relations in America, far from steadied by law's sure hand, are a tangle of frayed legal nerves." He tells how seesaws have started to vanish from playgrounds, how teachers are banned from touching students, and how emergency-room staff are blocked from attending to patients off hospital grounds--even if they can see them bleeding to death just 30 feet away. These aren't just speculations, a parade of hypothetical horror stories--they are actual trends and events that Howard describes and documents. The ability to weave dozens of anecdotes like these into his narrative is one of Howard's great strengths, and it allows him to make important points in entertaining ways.
Yet the book is much more than a collection of outrageous stories or a mere broadside against the legal system--though the legal system does come in for plenty of criticism. Instead, it's a meditation on the meaning of freedom, why freedom cannot exist outside of authority, and why individuals in positions of authority should have the ability to make decisions based on sound judgment. There is a temptation to secure liberty by restricting authority through the law, but this can be overdone, and it carries a high price: "Put law or any other formal construct in the middle of daily dealings, and people will start looking to the law instead of to one another." Then things get much worse: "The more our common institutions fail us, the more Americans want to limit their authority. Through a downward cycle of distrust, legal controls, [and] worse failure ... we drive Americans' governing institutions further into the bureaucratic maw." That is a terrible place to be, where no one is held accountable and antisocial behavior rules. And it has nothing at all to do with freedom. --John J. Miller
Book Description
In pursuit of fairness at any cost, we have created a society paralyzed by legal fear: Doctors are paranoid and principals powerless. Little league coaches, scared of liability, stop volunteering. Schools and hospitals start to crumble. The common good fades, replaced by a cacophony of people claiming their “individual rights.”
By turns funny and infuriating, this startling book dissects the dogmas of fairness that allow self-interested individuals to bully the rest of society. Philip K. Howard explains how, trying to honor individual rights, we removed the authority needed to maintain a free society. Teachers don’t even have authority to maintain order in the classroom. With no one in charge, the safe course is to avoid any possible risk. Seesaws and diving boards are removed. Ridiculous warning labels litter the American landscape: “Caution: Contents Are Hot.”
Striving to protect “individual rights,” we ended up losing much of our freedom. When almost any decision that someone disagrees with is a possible lawsuit, no one knows where he stands. A huge monument to the unknown plaintiff looms high above America, casting a dark shadow across our daily choices. Today, in the land of free speech, you’d have to be a fool to say what you really think.
This provocative book not only attacks the sacred cows of political correctness, but takes a breathtakingly bold stand on how to reinvigorate our common good. Only by restoring personal authority can schools begin to work again. Only by judges and legislatures taking back the authority to decide who can sue for what can doctors feel comfortable using their best judgment and American be liberated to say and do what they know is right. Lucid, honest, and hard hitting, The Collapse of the Common Good shows how Americans can bring back freedom and common sense to a society disabled by lawyers and legal fear.
Customer Reviews:
Howard Goes Too Far.......2006-10-20
Howard's previous effort, "Death of Common Sense: How Law is Suffocating America," was spot-on. This one, unfortunately, takes the misguided and anti-liberty view that our courts are supposed to make law, rather than decide its legality.
Howard correctly excoriates the judicial approach which examines laws in anal-rententive detail, which finds "hidden meaning" where there plainly is none. He correctly prefers the precepts of common law over the intrusive restrictions of legislation. He believes judges should have the power to simply throw out obviously ridiculous cases. Yet, Howard goes too far, and has nothing but praise for the idea that judges should be able to use their "superior abilities" to make life decisions for us poor, simple regular folks.
He assumes that judges are the wisest members of society, and loves the idea that they are often appointed for life, which supposedly leaves them free to consider long term views. He wholly embraces the idea that judges should make law for the benefit of society, that they should decide social issues for our own good. (A typical example found in the book is his adulation of the anti-property rights Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, an elitist and moral relativist. In a case Howard highlights, Holmes ruled that a statute which restricted the workday of bakery employees "for their own safety" to ten hours was legal. Fortunately, the rest of the court voted against him, which Howard laments. Of course, there is nothing in the Constitution allowing the government to restrict workers' hours, nothing which allows any government interference in business practices; any attempt to do so is a monstrous "stretching" of the document and an assault on liberty. Yet Holmes is lauded by Howard for his efforts at social intervention.)
Essentially, Howard wants judges to run the country, because they are just so darn smart.
Excellent book with some horrid editorial aspects........2004-07-12
Philip K. Howard, The Collapse of the Common Good (Ballantine, 2001)
Howard's first book, The Death of Common Sense, should be required reading in high schools and law schools across the nation. Instead, it's supported by a select few and most of the country has never heard of it, despite our best efforts. So Howard releases another book, and I pick it up.
The Collapse of the Common Good takes much the same refrain as The Death of Common Sense, but turns its focus from governmental process to the fallacy of individual rights. What is important here is not what Howard says (which is, naturally, common sense), but in how he says it. His arguments are persuasive and worded so that the average joe can understand what Howard is on about. As with The Death of Common Sense, this is a book that should be required reading.
I do have one problem with the book, and that is the way that the endnotes are handled. Endnotes (as opposed to footnotes) are annoying enough, and publishers should realize that the endnote is archaic (now that students have access to computers, footnotes are easily achieved by even college freshmen; the use of endnotes by professional book publishers looks even more amateur), but The Collapse of the Common Good takes this annoyance to a whole new level by not including endnote numbers in the text; the exhaustive section of endnotes has them referred to only by page number. Perhaps I should have said "exhausting" endnote section. The complete unprofessionalism of the way what should have been footnotes are handled loses the book a full point.
Other than that, though, another must-read from Howard. I think I'm going to start giving them as christmas gifts, and keep giving them until people get the message. ****
A book that will really make you think.......2004-02-06
As an immigrant to the US (from Mexico), one of the hardest things for me to get used to was the skewed sense of freedom and entitlement that is sometimes expressed in this country. On my own I had been trying to come to grips with the ideas of extreme lawsuits, political correctness, and limits on authority. While I'm in favor of the basic ideas expressed in all these principles, I constantly get a feeling that many people don't understand the true meaning of their rights and simply abused their privileges.
This book validated my beliefs, but more importantly, helped me to better understand how we have come to act this way. It also helped me express all my feelings about this subject in a simple way: Our over emphasis on our individual freedoms and (supposed) entitlements is putting in jeopardy our common good, and we are ultimately hurting ourselves.
I think this book should be read by anyone who wants to be a true contributor to the common good.
Gets you thinking.......2003-12-02
I thought this book was an easy read. Howard does his best to light a fire under you to get you thinking. People are so worried about their individual rights, common sense gets thrown out with the bath water!!! This is a good motivational book for any elected official to read. I actually read this book for an assignment, and the book opened my eyes on really how inhumane or shallow our culture is becoming.
Great book.......2003-02-19
Every politician, every lawyer, every judge, and especially every citizen in America should read this book. It explains clearly and concisely how bad laws and frivolous lawsuits are undermining our country. Everything has to have warning labels, everything has to be dumbed down, anything remotely dangerous (such as the teeter-totter or playground slide) has to be eliminated, and teachers aren't allowed to punish bad kids for fear of being sued. Government unions make it impossible to fire incompetent workers, and anti-discrimination laws cause the very discrimination that they are supposed to prevent. After reading this book, you will understand better why government, corporations, and society are not working as good as they should. How can they, with the guillotine of potential lawsuits hanging over our heads?
Book Description
In 1995, Ken Saro-Wiwa, a writer, political activist, and leader of the Niger Delta's Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP), was summarily executed by Nigeria's brutal military junta. MOSOP was formed out of a final, desperate need to protest the destruction of a people's land and culture by two forces: a giant multinational corporation, Royal Dutch Shell, and a series of corrupt and repressive Nigerian governments.
With the support of the Nigerian regime, Shell has instituted practices such as gas flaring (the ignition of gas in the atmosphere), the laying of dangerous high-pressure oil pipelines above ground, and the pollution of water sources, degrading the land and leaving many local people destitute. In contrast to the beneficial picture of the corporation's activities painted by its public relations professionals, authors Ike Okonta and Oronto Douglas have found persuasive evidence that Shell and the Nigerian government share responsibility for making the Niger Delta one of the world's most endangered ecosystems.
As compelling as it is important, Where Vultures Feast is a story that demands to be heard.
Customer Reviews:
Over the top.......2007-09-24
The one good thing I will say is that this is essentially the only source of information about Shell and the conflict in Nigeria.
Unfortunately, it comes across as agenda-driven and biased. The authors make Shell employees out to be the evil landlords in the 1920s movies who twirl their mustaches and tie orphans to railroad tracks.
Everyone knows that Shell has taken advantage of a corrupt, rent-seeking government and they have been dangerously irresponsible with the environment that was entrusted to them. Everyone knows that they are making money, corrupt politicians are making money and overall, Shell being in Nigeria is not helping average Nigerians much. This book takes those problems and pushes their intent, criminal culpability and predisposition to evil past the limits of believability.
The authors have vested interests in the power struggles and they are not in any way objective, nor do they try to be so. Their agenda is pushed hard from page one.
In addition to a cartoonish view of Shell and their employees as evil vampires, the native Ogoni people are made out to be the exalted Noble Savages found in 19th century literature.
When you read this book, then read the newspaper, something doesn't connect. The people who are fighting Shell are simply local and regional gangland-style powerbrokers who are most likely a bigger threat to the Ogoni than Shell could ever hope to be, even at their mustache-twirling worst. It is hard to reconcile the author's view of the anti-Shell movements as being non-violent (a term constantly used to describe indigenous reaction) when some of these groups kidnap toddlers and hold them for ransom.
On the positive side, I learned more about Ken Saro-Wiwa from reading this book, which was good, but not much else in the book helped. Outisde of learning the names of some of the groups and getting dates to research further, this book is a waste of time.
Corporate imperialism at its worst.......2006-08-08
This book provides an insightful history of how the Royal Shell Corporation and other oil companies have destroyed the environment and societies of the Niger Delta. The book starts with a short history of Western colonialism from the 1600s to the WWII. Starting with the discovery of oil post WWII, Shell Oil, along with Mobil, Texaco, Agip, BP and Chevron have replaced western governments as the de facto rulers of this region. The oil companies obtain oil from the Niger Delta, sell it, and use some of the profits to pay Nigerian government officials to safeguard their pipelines and oilwells in the country. The latter often includes torturing and killing locals who protest the pollution from oil drilling, flaring, and oil spills. All of this is glossed over by a multi-million dollar PR campaign by the Shell and the other oil companies.
The authors of this book document the history of environmental pollution in this area by citing specific oil spills, gas flares, and pipeline breaks. The authors also give a detailed history of the actions committed by Shell and its henchmen within the Nigerian goverment in order to suppress the natives of the Niger Delta. These include outright lies to the local people, stalling action by forming committees, intimidation of local leaders, etc...
Overall, this book shows the worst of corporate greed within the 20th century. The book is well argued and easy to read with lots of references. I highly recommend it.
Average customer rating:
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Desert Duel With Satan
Steve Novak
Manufacturer: Trafford Publishing
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Binding: Paperback
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ASIN: 1552127389
Release Date: 2006-07-06 |
Product Description
World War II novel. Somewhat romantic with a bittersweet ending. The battles and locations are accurate. Also contains some scripture.
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Fate of Vultures: New Poetry of Africa (African Writers)
Musaemura Zimunya , and
Peter Porter
Manufacturer: Heinemann (Txt)
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ASIN: 0435905503 |
Book Description
This digital document is an article from Dollars & Sense, published by Thomson Gale on March 22, 2007. The length of the article is 923 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Citation Details
Title: George Bush's favorite vultures: how financial birds of prey are seizing Africa's AIDS medicine.(Donegal International, Michael Francis Sheehan, and Paul Singer of Elliott Associates)
Author: Greg Palast
Publication:
Dollars & Sense (Newsletter)
Date: March 22, 2007
Publisher: Thomson Gale
Issue: 270
Page: 8(1)
Distributed by Thomson Gale
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This digital document is an article from Wilson Bulletin, published by Wilson Ornithological Society on June 1, 1995. The length of the article is 1108 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.
Citation Details
Title: The Vultures of Africa. (book reviews)
Author: Patricia G. Parker
Publication:
Wilson Bulletin (Refereed)
Date: June 1, 1995
Publisher: Wilson Ornithological Society
Volume: v107
Issue: n2
Page: p392(2)
Article Type: Book Review
Distributed by Thomson Gale
Average customer rating:
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Where Vultures Feast: Forty Years of Shell in the Niger Delta
Ike Okonta , and
Oronto Douglas
Manufacturer: Stylus Publishing
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
Niger
| Africa
| History
| Subjects
| Books
Nigeria
| Africa
| History
| Subjects
| Books
General
| World
| History
| Subjects
| Books
Conservation
| Environment
| Outdoors & Nature
| Subjects
| Books
International Institutions
| Political Science
| Social Sciences
| Nonfiction
| Subjects
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ASIN: 0745313329 |
Average customer rating:
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The Vultures of Africa
Manufacturer: R. Friedman Books in association with the Vulture Study Group
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding
Ornithology
| Zoology
| Biological Sciences
| Science
| Subjects
| Books
ASIN: 1874802033 |
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- Kon-Tiki: Across the Pacific in a Raft
- Lessons from a Sheep Dog
- Letters from Africa, 1914-1931
- Letters from New Orleans
- Little Chapel on the River: A Pub, a Town and the Search for What Matters Most
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