I read a galley copy that I received from the author, Paul Barrett, a couple months ago when I was up visiting New York City. I met Paul when he came out with his previous book, Glock. Since I know firearms, Glocks, forums, blogs, and social media, I helped show and introduce him around. I'm helping him again. And, as part of that, I read _Law of the Jungle by Paul M. Barrett
Law of the Jungle: The $19 Billion Legal Battle Over Oil in the Rain Forest and the Lawyer Who'd Stop at Nothing to Win_.

I know a lot less about what happened in Ecuador that I do about plastic pistols. That said, that helped since the non fiction book was a cliff hanger for me. I didn't ruin it by jumping on Wikipedia or reading Paul's reporting about the Cofán Indians v. Texaco/Chevron or spoiling it by looking at Wikipedia, so the subject was new to me.

One thing I notices about this book that was very much like _Glock_ was how balanced the reporting is. This book is going to piss off both the environmentalists as well as the free market capitalists as well. The sign of good reporting is that both sides feel slighted.

While this book is primarily an exploration of the cult of personality known as Steven Donziger, the larger-than-life, Harvard-educated, class-action lawyer who took an unwinnable David and Goliath case between the plaintiffs in the Lago Agrio oil field case (the indigenous Cofán people) against Texaco (now part of Chevron).

Like any David v Goliath case, I thought I would be rooting for Donziger and his lieutenant Pablo Fajardo; however, both sides played for their lives and Steven Donziger was maybe a little too open and honest about what lengths he was willing to take to win the lawsuit.

At the end of the day, there were two heroes: Pablo Fajardo and the Rule of Law.

I also highly recommend watching the movie _Crude_ -- it's a documentary commissioned by Donziger and directed by Joe Berlinger -- it's amazing to put faces to names and voices to text after you've explored such a maddening international circus.

Hell, there's even a cameo by Sting and his wife, Trudie Styler, as Steven Donziger brings world attention to one of the worst oil spill/environmental disaster, the Lago Agrio oil field in Ecuador.

I must admit, it took me a while to read the book. The book's beautifully written and is easy to read. Like I said before, it's balanced, journalistic, and even brings the author into the narrative (it goes from strikingly objective to rather personal); however, it still was a challenging read because I am neither a lawyer nor an environmentalist.

That said, it's amazing to see how the legal, judicial, environmental, and capitalist systems work, under the hood and when nobody should look (note: thing twice about commissioning an all-access documentary film crew if you have impulse control and tend to want to blurt morally ambiguous advice and offer no-holds-barred strategy that may well be how things are done in Quito but don't come across very well in US Courts -- just don't do it!).

I am glad I read the book. It changed me. As you might have guessed, I am skeptical and don't consider myself an environmentalist at all. I am also neither a lawyer nor a political operator. That said, I wonder where I have been hiding because I had not heard anything about this case at all -- and I wonder why. I guess I am in a silo.

That's the good thing about the book: I believe it'll be able to speak outside of and across the silos and echo chambers that tend to only preach to the choir.

Paul Barrett did the same thing with his book Glock: he wrote a book that transcended the pro- and anti-gun conversation.

The Law of the Jungle has surely been able to transcend both the pro- and anti-environmentalists and also the pro- and anti-capitalists, too.

I haven't read a book that has changed me as much since reading Showdown at Gucci Gulch by Jeffrey Birnbaum. ( )

I read a galley copy that I received from the author, Paul Barrett, a couple months ago when I was up visiting New York City. I met Paul when he came out with his previous book, Glock. Since I know firearms, Glocks, forums, blogs, and social media, I helped show and introduce him around. I'm helping him again. And, as part of that, I read _Law of the Jungle by Paul M. Barrett
Law of the Jungle: The $19 Billion Legal Battle Over Oil in the Rain Forest and the Lawyer Who'd Stop at Nothing to Win_.

I know a lot less about what happened in Ecuador that I do about plastic pistols. That said, that helped since the non fiction book was a cliff hanger for me. I didn't ruin it by jumping on Wikipedia or reading Paul's reporting about the Cofán Indians v. Texaco/Chevron or spoiling it by looking at Wikipedia, so the subject was new to me.

One thing I notices about this book that was very much like _Glock_ was how balanced the reporting is. This book is going to piss off both the environmentalists as well as the free market capitalists as well. The sign of good reporting is that both sides feel slighted.

While this book is primarily an exploration of the cult of personality known as Steven Donziger, the larger-than-life, Harvard-educated, class-action lawyer who took an unwinnable David and Goliath case between the plaintiffs in the Lago Agrio oil field case (the indigenous Cofán people) against Texaco (now part of Chevron).

Like any David v Goliath case, I thought I would be rooting for Donziger and his lieutenant Pablo Fajardo; however, both sides played for their lives and Steven Donziger was maybe a little too open and honest about what lengths he was willing to take to win the lawsuit.

At the end of the day, there were two heroes: Pablo Fajardo and the Rule of Law.

I also highly recommend watching the movie _Crude_ -- it's a documentary commissioned by Donziger and directed by Joe Berlinger -- it's amazing to put faces to names and voices to text after you've explored such a maddening international circus.

Hell, there's even a cameo by Sting and his wife, Trudie Styler, as Steven Donziger brings world attention to one of the worst oil spill/environmental disaster, the Lago Agrio oil field in Ecuador.

I must admit, it took me a while to read the book. The book's beautifully written and is easy to read. Like I said before, it's balanced, journalistic, and even brings the author into the narrative (it goes from strikingly objective to rather personal); however, it still was a challenging read because I am neither a lawyer nor an environmentalist.

That said, it's amazing to see how the legal, judicial, environmental, and capitalist systems work, under the hood and when nobody should look (note: thing twice about commissioning an all-access documentary film crew if you have impulse control and tend to want to blurt morally ambiguous advice and offer no-holds-barred strategy that may well be how things are done in Quito but don't come across very well in US Courts -- just don't do it!).

I am glad I read the book. It changed me. As you might have guessed, I am skeptical and don't consider myself an environmentalist at all. I am also neither a lawyer nor a political operator. That said, I wonder where I have been hiding because I had not heard anything about this case at all -- and I wonder why. I guess I am in a silo.

That's the good thing about the book: I believe it'll be able to speak outside of and across the silos and echo chambers that tend to only preach to the choir.

Paul Barrett did the same thing with his book Glock: he wrote a book that transcended the pro- and anti-gun conversation.

The Law of the Jungle has surely been able to transcend both the pro- and anti-environmentalists and also the pro- and anti-capitalists, too.

I haven't read a book that has changed me as much since reading Showdown at Gucci Gulch by Jeffrey Birnbaum. ( )

The book lays out the case that began in 1964. Texaco established themselves in Ecuador and began drilling for oil in the rainforest. It covers the political mess created bu less than scrupulous business practices and corrupt dealings.It follows the ins and outs of the situation through the modern lawsuit about the subject.

The book has extensive research and very few aspects of the case go unsupported. It does lack some technical details about the drilling process which could bolster the pro-environment stance further by demonstrating the scientific impact of the drilling. The case is presented with a noticeable bias towards one side and while the research does given some aspect of impartiality, the author's feelings are never in doubt. Including more interviews or research into the Texaco side of the case might have presented a clearer picture of this case.

The writing is a bit stilted and the text can come off more as a diatribe or editorial than a researched history of an legal situation. This does make the text flow erratically at times but the quality of the content and depth of the research do balance this out. ( )

This is an interesting story, but a hard one to tell. At times “Law of the Jungle” reads like a novel (but nonfiction), other times like a radio story, but other times it feels a little disjointed. The author clearly did his research, and while he knows the story inside and out, I had a hard time putting the stand-alone sentences into order. At times, too, I had to wonder about the author’s potential bias. He paints the big oil companies like “bad guys,” which in many ways they could be, but he doesn’t really try to tell their side objectively. The book just seems to show both oil companies and lawyers at their worst. Really, I’m more interested in environmental issues, and human rights in general, than lawyers showing off.

When Texaco, later absorbed by Chevron, started taking oil from Ecuador, the whole area became polluted and the people living there suffered horrible health problems. I wish the author had explained the drilling process more, and how so much oil could leak all over the place. It seems like a lot of waste, unless it was only that, a waste product, and they didn’t do a good job containing it. But couldn’t they have done a cleaner job? Then, yes, it is an expensive cleanup, including medical costs, but, isn’t there an amount that would have justly covered this? The lawyers, and everyone else involved, shouldn’t think about the money they can make off the tragedy of exploitation, but in making up to these people and their land some of what they have lost, because some of that cannot even be recovered. (Can you tell I’m not a lawyer?) I found the one-word chapter titles that do little to help guide the reader, and I just couldn’t get through this one. That happens sometimes.

Note: I received a free copy of this title through BloggingForBooks in exchange for an honest review. For more reviews, follow my blog at http://matt-stats.blogspot.com/ ( )

In 1964, Texaco arrived in Ecuador and began drilling for oil in the rainforest. By the early 1970s, the government had increased its cut of the profits, and demanded that Texaco give part ownership to the newly formed state oil company Petroecuador. In 1992, Texaco departed Ecuador, transferring its remaining operations to Petroecuador. Over three decades, the rainforest had become an environmental mess of contaminated water and oozing pits of sludge, a consequence of lax laws and the “prohibitive costs” of adhering to standards that would be expected in the US. Of course the people most affected were not the politicians and executives making decisions and deals, but the indigenous inhabitants of the rainforest. In 1993, Cristobal Bonifaz, native (from a prominent political family) of Ecuador and immigrant to the US, filed a class action law suit against Texaco in its New York City headquarters, assisted by Steven Donziger, formerly a journalist in Nicaragua and more recently a Harvard Law School classmate of his son. In a series of judgments from 1996-2001, the case was dismissed in New York. In 2000, Chevron acquired Texaco. In 2003, the case was resumed in Ecuador.

This book is about the ins and outs, ups and downs, twists and turns, of the Aguinda v. Texaco/Chevron case in its various manifestations. On its face straightforward: Texaco had polluted the rainforest, and Chevron had assumed legal responsibility. In reality complex: Texaco had coexisted with Petroecuador, and Petroecuador had continued dubious practices in overlapping locations, so how to determine which sites had been polluted when by whom? The rainforest inhabitants correlated illnesses and deaths with oil company activity, but how to link specific cases with certain causes? If only all the problems had been practical. The focus is on Steven Donziger, who may have begun with honorable intentions, but got caught up in winning the game and lost sight of his ostensible clients: dramatizing court appearances, inviting a promotional video documentary (“Crude”), discouraging cleanup because it would destroy evidence, composing a report supporting damages in the multiple billions and recruiting a puppet consultant to present it as objective and neutral. Chevron was far from pure and innocent, especially considering its wealth and the moral spirit of the case, but did have a point that the Ecuador legal system was corrupt, and the damages had been wildly exaggerated. In the end, two decades after the beginning, the rainforest could have been restored to pristine condition with the money that went to legal fees.

The book seems exhaustively reported. I don’t doubt its factual accuracy, and I appreciated the restrained and nuanced portrayal of environmentalists vs. international oil corporations. The style is a tad tedious; the 250+ page book is arranged as an extended magazine article, with legal/financial event after event, chronologically and monotonically. It is not as historically or culturally immersive as Toms River, for example. Still, definitely worth reading for its merits, but prepare to be demoralized. ( )