Doug Brunt

So Emmanuel stands up to the king of Sweden and says, no, no, no, we're going to, you know, I'm taking my role as the executor of his will.

Seriously, we're going to have the prize.

And so he, at the last second, rescues the prize.

When they first bought land in Caucasus, in present-day Azerbaijan, along the Caspian Sea, people were skimming oil out of puddles.

There was no drilling.

Any wells that were dug were dug by hand with spades.

So they come down there with great... They are chemists and engineers by trade.

And so they come down there and they completely...

turn it around.

But this was in the 1870s, in the time of the Tsars.

So the book has these amazing detours through history that include the Rothschilds and Rockefellers and Dostoevsky and Fabergé.

Well, yeah, it's written ideally in a very novelistic way.

It's a ripping read.

I mean, you go through it, but it has these fun detours, but it is...

a piece of history.

And Stalin, as you say, grew up as a neighbor to Nobel in Southern Russia.

He grew up in Georgia, which is between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea.

And he actually worked in the oil fields of the Nobels and the Rothschilds, who are another big figure in Russian oil.

And so Emmanuel Nobel and Joseph Stalin, they're sort of like these counterpoints to each other.

And Stalin's looking at these oil capitalists, industrialists with envy and hatred.