Penguin Press title named FT/Goldman Business Book of the Year

02.11.12 | Charlotte Williams - The Bookseller

Penguin Press title Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power has won the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award.
Writer Steve Coll was awarded the £30,000 prize at a dinner at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Manhattan last night.
The author is a staff writer at the New Yorker magazine and president of the New America Foundation, a public-policy institute in Washington. The book investigates the ExxonMobil Corporation and the secrets of the oil industry, with the narrative taking readers inside the company's activities all over the world.

The judging panel was this year chaired by FT editor Lionel Barber, with Coll's title triumphing over five other shortlisted titles:
THe Hour Between Dog and wolf by John Coates (Penguin Press); Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu and James A Robinson (Crown Business, Profile Books); Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography by Walter Isaacson (Simon & Schuster; Little, Brown); What Money Can't Buy by Michael J Sandel (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; Allen Lane) and Volcker: The Triumph of Persistence by William L Silber (Bloomsbury Press).