Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0393049353, Hardcover)
How a female investigative journalist brought down the world's greatest tycoon and broke up the Standard Oil monopoly.Long before the rise of mega-corporations like Wal-Mart and Microsoft, Standard Oil controlled the oil industry with a monopolistic force unprecedented in American business history. Undaunted by the ruthless power of its owner, John D. Rockefeller (1839-1937), a fearless and ambitious reporter named Ida Minerva Tarbell (1857-1944) confronted the company known simply as "The Trust." Through her peerless fact gathering and devastating prose, Tarbell, a muckraking reporter at
McClure's magazine, pioneered the new practice of investigative journalism. Her shocking discoveries about Standard Oil and Rockefeller led, inexorably, to a dramatic confrontation during the opening decade of the twentieth century that culminated in the landmark 1911 Supreme Court antitrust decision breaking up the monopolies and forever altering the landscape of modern American industry. Based on extensive research in the Tarbell and Rockefeller archives,
Taking on the Trust is a vivid and dramatic history of the Progressive Era with powerful resonance for the first decades of the twenty-first century. 16 pages of illustrations.
(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:16 -0400)
Wikipedia in English
I wasn't really sure what I was getting into exactly when I got this book, but I was really pleased with the book. I expected a bit more about the aftermath of the exposé and supreme court rulings on Standard Oil and how that (briefly) changed American capitalis...more This was a really captivating book detailing Ida Tarbell's life, her journalism career and her exposé on Standard Oil and John D. Rockefeller. It also contains a lot of interesting biographical details on Rockefeller as well.
I wasn't really sure what I was getting into exactly when I got this book, but I was really pleased with the book. I expected a bit more about the aftermath of the exposé and supreme court rulings on Standard Oil and how that (briefly) changed American capitalism, but it was really more focused on Ida Tarbell, and I found her life to be very fascinating. The chapter on the exposé is almost anti-climatic, but I didn't mind.
Ida Tarbell comes across as an amazing woman, and I was rooting for her throughout the whole book. I've never read about such a fiercely independent woman living in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and I really liked how she was determined to live her life and do her own thing without getting married or having children, a pretty radical thing to do in those days. (