IDA TARBELL

The astonishing true story of the fall of an oil magnate and the rise of the world’s first investigative journalist.

IDA is a taut political thriller that takes us to a time when the new America, with all its energy, innovation and knavery, is only just beginning. This is a fast-changing and modernising world where lawlessness and business go hand in hand. Its beating heart is New York, a city thriving on capitalist aspirations. Business is booming as the first mega corporations emerge on Wall Street and beyond.

 

The first – and biggest – of these corporations has set its sights on the country’s greatest natural asset: oil. The corporation is Standard Oil, and at its helm sits JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER: entrepreneur, visionary, recluse, a ruthless capitalist with limitless power. For 30 years he has applied his uncanny shrewdness, systematic determination and capitalist vision to the creation of an industrial giant without parallel in the world.

 

But now, at the dawn of a new century, he finds himself facing his most formidable rival ever – not another businessman, but a spirited woman determined to prove that Standard Oil hasnever played fair.

 

IDA TARBELL is a woman far ahead of her time, whose single-minded convictions will take her all the way to the corridors of power in the White House. Her seminal investigation will not onlydetermine the fate of Rockefeller’s empire, it will also set a standard for journalism hard to equal even today.