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are excellent summer reading, 1st book is fact based fiction, second is non-fiction. I am in the middle of the more expensive scarce full length version of the standard Oil book, but there are cheaper condensed versions available online. And if those two aren't enough history of the lying, theiving oil companies that now run our country add The Seven Sisters to your list....
Upton Sinclair
Oil!
from ucpress:
In Oil! Upton Sinclair fashioned a novel out of the oil scandals of the Harding administration, providing in the process a detailed picture of the development of the oil industry in Southern California. Bribery of public officials, class warfare, and international rivalry over oil production are the context for Sinclair's story of a genial independent oil developer and his son, whose sympathy with the oilfield workers and socialist organizers fuels a running debate with his father. Senators, small investors, oil magnates, a Hollywood film star, and a crusading evangelist people the pages of this lively novel.
reviews
"A marvelous panorama of Southern California life. It is storytelling with an edge on it."--The New Republic
"Oil! remains the most ambitious Southern California novel of the 1920s. . . . Chosen by the Literary Guild, Oil! made the best-seller list. Its sales were helped along when Sinclair, hoping to get arrested, personally hawked copies of the book on the streets of Boston, after it was banned there for its outspoken advocacy of birth control."--Kevin Starr, Endangered Dreams
"A strange mixture of Flaming Youth, Karl Marx and the front-page stories of the last four years conspire with Mr. Sinclair to produce a novel which, structurally, is a well-built piece of work. It contains some interesting reporting on the technique of oil production, and is written in a buoyant self-confident style which goes far to win the sympathy of the reader . "--New York Times
"As sheer story Oil! is a tremendous piece of work, even greater in significance as a study of diverse personalities than as a social document; it is a modern Dombey and Son, but more vigorous, more poignant, and more honest."--The Nation
History of Standard Oil-Ida Tarbell
The book that helped inaugurate the muckraker movement. "During the post-Civil War age of industrialization in the United States the great monopolists reached their positions of eminence because they were even greater competitors. John D. Rockefeller and his associates did not build the Standard Oil Company in the board rooms of Wall Street banks and investment houses and launch it upon the tossing seas of watered stock. They fought their way to control by rebate and drawback, bribe and blackmail, espionage and price cutting, and perhaps even more important, by ruthless, never slothful efficiency of organization and production..." - from introduction
"This work is the outgrowth of an effort on the part of the editors of McClure"s Magazine to deal concretely in their pages with the trust question. In order that their readers might have a clear and succinct notion of the processes by which a particular industry passes from the control of the many to that of the few, they decided a few years ago to publish a detailed narrative of the history of the growth of a particular trust. The Standard Oil Trust was chosen for obvious reasons. It was the first in the field, and it has furnished the methods, the charter, and the traditions for its followers. It is the most perfectly developed trust in existence; that is, it satisfies most nearly the trust ideal of entire control of the commodity in which it deals. Its vast profits have led its officers into various allied interests, such as railroads, shipping, gas, copper, iron, steel, as well as into banks and trust companies, and to the acquiring and solidifying of these interests it has applied the methods used in building up the Oil Trust. It has led in the struggle against legislation directed against combinations. Its power in state and Federal government, in the press, in the college, in the pulpit, is generally recognised. The perfection of the organisation of the Standard, the ability and daring with which it has carried out its projects, make it the pre-eminent trust of the world - the one whose story is best suited to illuminate the subject of combinations of capital... The officers of the company courteously offered to give me all the assistance in their power, an offer of which I have freely taken advantage. In accepting assistance from the Standard men as from independents I distinctly stated that I wanted facts, and that I reserved the right to use them according to my own judgement of their meaning, that my object was to learn more perfectly what was actually done - not to learn what my informants thought of what had been done. It is perhaps not too much to say that there is not a single important episode in the history of the Standard Oil Company, so far as I know it, or a notable step in the growth, which I have not discussed more or less fully with officers of the company." - from Preface.
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