Silverstein is a top notch investigative journalist. Alexander Cockburn was his mentor, and the two co-edited Counterpunch a cutting edge lefty muckraking sheet during the 1990s. Silverstein is not anywhere near the kind of literary stylist of longform journalism that Cockburn was… but as a deep digging source developing fact-finder he is unmatched. His short book contains six powerfully packed chapter bios of a series of shady oil trade fixers, finders, flacks, financiers and a Bush to boot. Worthy of a place on the shelf next to Steve Coll’s masterful Private Empire: ExxonMobile and American Power (2013). Silverstein’s reliance on the two 800 page whopper books by Daniel Yergin , The Prize (1992) and more recently The Quest (2012) suggest that I need to keep some room on that shelf for these two. Upton Sinclair’s.. Oil (1927) is on the shelf too.. in the earliest best Muckraking tradition!