I got this book last year and read it in a month. When I was done reading it, there were entire chapters I could not explain to anyone. So, I decided to read the damn thing again. Though this time I took notes, read the endnotes, went through almost all the thousand references, and even watched YouTube videos when I couldn’t comprehend what I was reading. It took me five months to complete it and there are still things I don’t fully comprehend.
In a nutshell, this book is about Charles Koch and the biggest private company he built. But Kochland is so much more than simple corporate history. It’s about taxation and how to change the laws so that you don’t pay them. It’s about the history of labor unions in America and their gut-wrenching downfall. It’s about products we use every day and yet never think about them twice, as the glue on the sticker on our Amazon delivery box. It’s about oil and fracking and it’s about the environment. It’s about state-sponsored climate change denial. It’s about democrats and republicans and their failure to see beyond their five-year term. It’s about getting away with murder (literally) and having corporate compliance so strong that you are not just complying by the laws of present-day, but legislations that might come four years from now. It about the power that comes when you know the future. It’s about money and poverty.
This book does what every good mentor does. It refuses to spoon-feed you and it lets you know how ignorant you are. Which makes it a rather weak contender for leisurely reading. The requisite of reading this book is to put aside an hour or two every day. It also requires you to keeping referring to the endnotes and references. I ended up reading two separate books in order to understand what was going on in one of the chapters. There will be notes in the margin, most of the questions.
What Shivam Says 