Christopher Leonard

For five decades, CEO Charles Koch has kept Koch Industries quietly operating in deepest secrecy, with a view toward very, very long-term profits. He’s a genius businessman, but there’s another side to this story. If you want to understand how we killed the unions in this country, how we widened the income divide, stalled progress on climate change, and how our corporations bought the influence industry, all you have to do is read Christopher Leonard’s Kochland (Simon & Schuster). Seven years in the making, Kochland reads like a true-life thriller, telling the ambitious tale of how one private company consolidated power over half a century – and how in doing so, it helped transform capitalism into something that feels deeply alienating to many Americans today.