Blowout by Rachel Maddow: book review

Blowout: Corrupted Democracy, Rogue State Russia, and the Richest, Most Destructive Industry on Earth (2019) is the best-seller book on the oil and gas industry from about 1969 to 2019.

This book is not comprehensive in its aim, stating that, instead, it shines a light on ‘landmarks’ of the ‘whole slimy slick that the oil and gas industry has left behind it all over the world.’

Maddow exposes, in snippets, the lucrative, but corrupt, industry that not only fuels Earth, but does so while fueling greed and environmental destruction.

She writes, pessimistically, of the environmental impacts of the fracking process – ‘Can [shale gas] be produced safely, while protecting water supplies and the environment?’

She writes, scathingly, about the growing wealth of, predominantly, Russian and American individuals and companies – and what they will do to get it, secrete it, buy with it, and oftentimes flaunt it. The big names are global politicians and businessmen and the fight for drilling and mineral rights.

Rachel Maddow outlines some specific problems in a punchy, easy-to-read, interesting, and informative way, but the solutions she proposes are more general, with fewer examples. The sweeping call to ‘preserve and protect our democracies from the influence of the industry, and from the rogue-state, anti-democracy behemoth it has fuelled in Russia’ doesn’t go far enough in calling out and solving excess, greed, corrupt power, and narcissism.

MARTINA NICOLLS

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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international human rights-based consultant in education, healing and wellbeing, peace and stabilization, foreign aid audits and evaluations, and the author of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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