My Review of "Law of the Jungle"

Paul Barrett's 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 explores the long-running class action lawsuit against Chevron in Ecuador in a narrative that reads like a John Grisham novel.

Law of the Jungle is the real-life story of plaintiffs' lawyer Stephen Donziger and what the book's cover describes as his "obsessive crusade -- waged at any cost" against Chevron allegedly on behalf of the inhabitants of Ecuador's Amazon rain forest.  It's also the story of how Chevron turned the tables on Donziger's corrupt scheme, filing a civil racketeering lawsuit that accused the plaintiffs' lawyer of trying to extort money from the company through massive fraud.

An, of course, Chevron won that racketeering case, when U.S. District Court Judge Lewis Kaplan ruled that Donziger had obtained a $19 billion judgment against the oil company in Ecuador by promising the ruling Ecuadorian judge a $500,000 bribe. 

This is the book for legal buffs and folks who enjoy a good rollicking time through legal maneuvering.

I received a free copy of this book as part of the Blogging for Books program in exchange for my honest review here.