Doug Brunt

Hi, it's great to be here.

What is by getting the galleys is such a nice moment.

We opened the box, you know, as a family around the dining room table and you pull them out and you see it and you hold it in your hands after years of working on it.

It is a companion book to the diesel book.

Emmanuel Nobel has an appearance in the Rudolph diesel story.

It can be out of sequence.

And in fact, I haven't said this really.

The only people who know this next piece are you and my editor and a few people in archives around the world, but I'm working on a third, which will be, will complete a trilogy of,

of these three turn-of-the-century characters, Emmanuel Nobel essentially established the Russian oil industry along the Caspian Sea in southern Russia.

So by 1900, he and his family had built an oil business larger than Standard Oil.

And in World War I, he controlled more oil than anyone else on the planet.

So it was this huge prize sitting in southern Russia that Germany, the Brits, the Bolsheviks, the communists,

Japan, everybody wanted to get to the Nobel oil because they had essentially developed a whole oil infrastructure that was superior to anything else in the world.

Even to Rockefeller.

And yet, for reasons explained in the book,

Nobel has been obliterated from history.

Totally.

So this brings him back to life and tells the story.

But I mean, like a little I mean, it has, of course, the when the communists took over Stalin and Lenin, they nationalized all these businesses.

But everyone, even in that time, even when the Bolsheviks had taken over, everyone thought the communists are going to last about three days.