Edison To Enron: Energy Markets And Political Strategies

The oil industry in the United States has been the subject of innumerable histories. But books on the development of the natural gas industry and the electricity industry in the U.S. are scarce. Edison to Enron is a readable flowing history of two of America's largest and most colorful industries.

It begins with the story of Samuel Insull, a poor boy from England, who started his career as Thomas Edison’s right-hand man, then went on his own and became one of America's top industrialists. But when Insull’s General Electric’s energy empire collapsed during the Great Depression, the hitherto Great Man was denounced and prosecuted and died a pauper. Against that backdrop, the book introduces Ken Lay, a poor boy from Missouri who began his career as an aide to the head of Humble oil, now part of Exxon Mobil. Lay went on to become a Washington bureaucrat and energy regulator and then became the wunderkind of the natural gas industry in the 1980s with Enron.

To connect the lives of these two energy giants, Edison to Enron takes the reader through the flamboyant history of the American energy industry, from Texas wildcatters to the great pipeline builders to the Washington wheeler-dealers.

ROBERT L. BRADLEY JR., a 16-year Enron employee and Ken Lay confidant, is a noted free-market scholar and public-policy entrepreneur. The founder and CEO of the Institute for Energy Research, Bradley is the author of numerous books and essays on the history and political economy of energy. He is an adjunct scholar of the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C.; a visiting fellow of the Institute of Economic Affairs in London; and an honorary senior research fellow at the Center for Energy Economics at the University of Texas at Austin. In 2002, he received the Julian Simon Memorial Award for his work on energy and sustainable development.
Bradley lives in Houston and likes to spend time in the beautiful Texas Hill Country.