company. lets let s kind of start there. wide exxonmobil? how did you come to the subject? i know that previously in your career so why this company and how did it differ from some of their other subjects like that bin laden s? guest: it s an interesting, to me it was an interesting journey because as you point out i started out as a business reporter on wall street when i was very young and then i went abroad and worked more on the international subjects and after 9/11 i wrote about the war engines of the 9/11 attacks in 20 years of american covert policy in afghanistan in this vote goes towards and after that was over i thought you know i want to keep writing about america and the world after 9/11, this sort of asymmetric, strange groping that we had as the country to understand what the attacks were about and what they meant to the united states, what were the relationships with their middle east and that led me to the bin laden s which was a book intended to be about sa
writing assumes when he reading would it goes back to the free falling in the forest of there s no one there to hear it. if you ve written a really wonderful novel one of the parts of the process is that you want the readers to be enriched and enlarged by at you have to pull on everything at your disposal to do that. private enterprise exxonmobil and american power. he recently sat down with book tv to talk about the oil companies political and economic power and how it became the most profitable corporation in the world. hello, steve, thanks for joining us on after words today and congratulations on what is quite an achievement. fish i really enjoyed the book. it s like a novel. i mean, it really read like nonfiction in places which i m sure that as a writer you encounter some of that feeling as well and i know as a reporter that dealt with exxonmobil to probe this company, so let s kind of start there. why exxonmobil? how did you come to this subject? and i know that y
need to a government bailout. he spoke about the book earlier this year in michigan. [applause] thank you very much for coming in thank you for watching, viewers at home. i just wanted to start out by talking about how this book came about. i ve been covering ford motor company for the detroit news since 2005. and from the beginning when i started covering for it, i knew that i was really witnessing an incredible story. i didn t know how it s going to win, but i knew was happening in dearborn was either the death of an american icon or its resurrection. embolus privately rooting for the latter is going to write the story either way. so as i followed the two-day event of a turnaround for the detroit news, i also in the back of my mind was writing this book. and in 2010 when it became clear that ford had turned the corner and saved itself and data without taking a taxpayer bailout i might add, i approached bill ford, jun