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This lively biography of journalist Wanda Jablonski begs for a big-screen adaptation. (June 2008)
Kirkus
Intimate but also sweeping, capturing the myopia of both business and government as America's addiction to foreign oil set in over four decades. (April 15, 2008)
Booklist
Rubino, who worked with Jablonski on her innovative industry newsletter,Petroleum Intelligence Weekly, has written the first major biography of this irresistible trailblazer and it is galvanizing in its revelations. (Upfront Section, April 15, 2008)
The Houston Chronicle
...[F]emale reporters were so rare that no one forgot her. She walked into a cocktail party, and it was all men. She walked into a sheik's mud palace, and it was only men with swords. But then, of course, the only place she could meet the king of Saudi Arabia was in his harem." (August 25, 2008)
Dallas Morning News
A new biography, *Queen of the Oil Club*, by Anna Rubino, describes Ms. Jablonski's rich career as a journalist traveling the Middle East from the 1950s through the '80s to meet the oil ministers who would challenge the imperialism of Big Oil.
The book is also a history lesson on how OPEC rose to power. It's a topic of particular interest now, as raging oil prices reveal that OPEC's time in the sun might be waning. (July 6, 2008)
PopMatters.com
Rubino does a superb job of documenting Jablonski's long and influential career and placing her accomplishments against the time and place in which they were achieved. Jablonski's drive to get the stories no one else could get created a captivating life story that Rubino has made clear and accessible for all to read. (September 4, 2008)
Pajamas Media
Reading the book, it becomes clear that we heard it all before but did not pay attention. Although Wanda had a weakness for those oilmen who run the business, she always posed the alternate question. She was so insistent a voice in raising questions about oilmen and their world that they had a less flattering moniker than "queen of their club," giggling that she was a "buster" of a delicate part of male anatomy. (July 6, 2008)
Winston-Salem Journal Review
The book is beautifully written, very interesting and thoroughly enjoyable.In an unpredictable time for oil prices, with the war in Iraq and a bevy of countries needing large amounts of oil for industrialization efforts, Rubino's book gives a fair analysis of the modern era of oil. (August 24, 2008)
Winston-Salem Journal Feature
Daniel Yergin, the author of the Pulitzer-Prize-winning *The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power*, wrote the foreword for the book. In an e-mail, he said, "In addition to being a great story, Queen of the Oil Club is a must read at $140 a barrel.... Through this history, she really helps to make sense of how we got to today's $4 gasoline...I decided to write the introduction not only because of Wanda Jablonksi herself but also because I really admire the biography. It's irresistible." (July 7, 2008)
This lively biography of journalist Wanda Jablonski begs for a big-screen adaptation. In the 1950s, when women were rarely hired as business reporters, Jablonski became a force in the oil industry, boldly investigating deals and tracking the trade from London to Abu Dhabi. back to top
Kirkus Reviews, April 15, 2008
How one woman hurdled journalism's gender barrier to help shape the future of Big Oil.
Off the Record Research reporter Rubino once worked for Wanda Jablonski (1920-1992), the subject of this case study in how knowledgeable journalism can shape events. Born in Slovakia, Jablonski came to America at age five, when her father Eugen was hired by a Standard Oil affiliate. They arrived in Texas in the heyday of U.S. oil exploration; young Wanda was immersed in the excitement, and the technical jargon, of the petroleum boom. The family also lived in England and Egypt while Eugen pursued a peripatetic oil career. Wanda returned to the United States to get a bachelor of arts degree from Cornell and began graduate studies in public law and government at Columbia, but quit in 1943. She tried to get a job at the Council on Foreign Relations, but was turned down because she couldn't type. Chance took her to the stodgy but respected New York Journal of Commerce as a messenger. Her career took off when the regular petroleum reporter left and Jablonski was given a string of temporary assignments to write articles on the oil business, initially using the byline W.M. Jablonski to disguise her gender. After she moved to Petroleum Week in 1955, however, she won the right to use her full name; her ability to pry inside information from the secretive major oil companies had made her columns an industry must-read. Later, the affinity she developed with national leaders and oil ministers throughout the Middle East made Petroleum Intelligence Weekly, the publication she founded in 1961, "the bible of the international oil world." She often chided U.S. CEOs on their arrogance and insensitivity in international dealings, and to the extent that she saw it all coming, Jablonski deserved her nickname as "OPEC's midwife."
Intimate but also sweeping, capturing the myopia of both business and government as America's addiction to foreign oil set in over four decades. back to top
Booklist, Upfront Section, April 15, 2008
Women business journalists were rare in the 1940s, when "quick-witted and tart-tongued" Wanda Jablonski used her initials, W. M., to conceal her gender while writing about the international oil industry. Less than a decade later she was known simply as Wanda, having traveled to Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, and beyond, securing exclusive interviews and breaking major stories. Intense and intrepid, Wanda acquired her fascination with oil and geopolitics as a girl while accompanying her Slovakian geologist father to oilfields in Texas and the Middle East. Curious, ambitious, and charming, she became a phenomenally successful journalist and a controversial player in the rapidly evolving, world-altering oil industry. Routinely entrusted with invaluable insider information, she was a brilliant analyst, strategic writer, and indefatigable scotch-drinker and storyteller as glamorous as she was blunt. Rubino, who worked with Jablonski on her innovative industry newsletter, Petroleum Intelligence Weekly, has written the first major biography of this irresistible trailblazer and it is galvanizing in its revelations. As she vividly portrays Wanda in all her toughness and loneliness, Rubino recognizes the depth of Wanda's commitment to accurately and respectfully portraying the cultures of the Middle East and her belief that a nuanced understanding of this pivotal region was essential to world politics. In that, of course, this woman who was accused of being a spy and called "OPEC's midwife" was only too prescient.
-- Donna Seaman back to top
The Houston Chronicle, August 25, 2008
By DAVID IVANOVICH Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle Washington Bureau
Queen of the Oil Club details an unusual life
WASHINGTON --- Wanda Jablonski was what author Anna Rubino calls "once the most powerful woman in the world of oil."
As a reporter for the New York Journal of Commerce, Petroleum Week and
finally her own publication, the highly respected Petroleum Intelligence
Weekly, Jablonski helped loosen the oil companies' grip on the world oil
markets and hasten the rise of the Organization of the Petroleum
Exporting Countries.
Her extensive travels, extraordinary access and remarkable chutzpah made
Jablonski's articles about a secretive industry must-reads in corporate
boardrooms and oil ministries around the globe.
Rubino, a historian and journalist who worked for Jablonski at Petroleum
Intelligence Weekly before Jablonski's death in 1992, has written a
biography titled Queen of the Oil Club: The Intrepid Wanda Jablonski
and the Power of Information. Rubino spoke with Chronicle reporter
David Ivanovich.
Q: As a woman covering the world oil industry starting in 1944,
Jablonski faced real hostility in a male-dominated world. But she seemed
to turn her unique circumstances to her advantage.
A: She did. It was an advantage because female reporters were so rare
that no one forgot her. She walked into a cocktail party, and it was all
men. She walked into a sheik's mud palace, and it was only men with
swords. But then, of course, the only place she could meet the king of
Saudi Arabia was in his harem. But she thrived on inside information.
She didn't want to be too visible. There were countless stories, though,
of discrimination against her.
In the 1950s, a business story under a woman's byline would hold no
credibility. And, therefore, she had to hide behind her initials. Can
you imagine not being able to use your first name?
Peter Walters, who later became chairman of BP, took her to a party at
the New York Athletic Club that BP was giving. They got to the door, and
she was denied entry because she was a woman. She already was this
legend in the industry.
And then Walters says: "She's not a woman. She's Wanda Jablonski."
Q: She traveled everywhere.
A: She started that as a child, because she was the daughter of a
petroleum geologist for Mobil. She grew up moving from one exploration
region to another, including West Texas and the Middle East. And she had
learned the language of the oil business. She could talk derricks and
drill bits because that's what she learned as a child. And that's what
helped open doors for her.
Q: You call her "OPEC's midwife." How so?
A: She earned that moniker because she actually introduced the two
people who were the key founders of OPEC --- Venezuelan Oil Minister
Juan Pablo Perez Alfonso and the Saudi Oil Minister Abdullah Tariki ---
at the first Arab Oil Congress in Cairo in 1959. She introduced them
over either Coke or bourbon, depending on which audience she was
speaking with. But she readily said they would have met anyway.
She had reported on Perez Alfonso back in 1948. And her scoop on his
long-term plans toward nationalization of the Venezuelan oil industry
shocked Exxon, which was then called Standard Oil of New Jersey. They
invited her to come speak to their board. She did this at the age of 28.
And from then on, she behaved like a CEO. And they treated her like one.
They had to talk to her. They feared her. No one had the scoops she had.
Q: You mentioned how Jablonski interviewed Saudi King Saud in his
harem. She seems to have learned how to handle Middle Eastern rulers
well enough.
A: She was known for her battle of wits with both the oil company
chiefs and the leaders of the OPEC countries.
The Shah of Iran was reluctant to meet with her. She later found out he
didn't like her because she was a woman. He knew of her reputation for
getting information out of people. But he finally agreed to meet with
her in 1960, two months after OPEC was formed. She was told she would
have 20 minutes.
The chain-smoking shah just starts mouthing platitudes about Iran's
policy, and she stops taking notes.
She asks for a cigarette. He gets up and offers her a cigarette and
returns to his seat. And then she points out she didn't have a match
either. And she makes him get up a second time to light her cigarette.
She loved to say --- only half jokingly --- to her friends, "This is
how you have to deal with monarchs."
Cigarette now in hand, she then gives him a tutorial on how the
international oil markets worked and provokes him enough to give her a
scoop, that he saw OPEC only as a consultative body, not as an
organization that would challenge the major oil companies.
Q: Do you think Jablonski led, while certainly an amazing life,
ultimately a sad one?
A: No. I think she loved her life as a reporter. That was life for
her. But I do think, in her later years, she was very lonely.
And when I knew her, in the 1980s, in her later years, she was an
irascible boss. But she knew that. Because she was such a hard-charging,
driven person, she became impossible to live with.
She had her affairs in later years, but they didn't last. And many of
her friendships didn't survive her temperamental outbursts. But she
willingly chose this life. back to top
The Dallas Morning News July 6, 2008:
'Queen of the Oil Club' by Anna Rubino: When journalist Wanda Jablonski spoke, OPEC listened
Wanda Jablonski might be the most powerful journalist you never heard of.
Unless, of course, you were an oil minister or executive in the second half of the 20th century. Then you had to read her articles in Petroleum Week and, later, in her own publication, Petroleum Intelligence Weekly, to stay on top of the biggest developments in the industry.
Ms. Jablonski brought in major scoops, including Saudi Arabia's King Fahd's firing of oil minister Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani in 1986 for refusing to violate production ceilings set by OPEC.
She also befriended oil ministers and helped them articulate their nationalistic dreams of wresting control of their natural resources from major oil companies. Power was shifting from Western Big Oil companies to once-poor nations growing rich on their oil reserves, and Ms. Jablonski understood this long before many oil executives did.
She introduced the founders of OPEC, Venezuela's Juan Pablo Perez Alfonso and Saudi Arabia's Abdullah Tariki, to each other. She carried messages between oil executives and Middle Eastern leaders. She even taught the Shah of Iran a thing or two about the industry.
A new biography, Queen of the Oil Club, by Anna Rubino, describes Ms. Jablonski's rich career as a journalist traveling the Middle East from the 1950s through the '80s to meet the oil ministers who would challenge the imperialism of Big Oil.
The book is also a history lesson on how OPEC rose to power. It's a topic of particular interest now, as raging oil prices reveal that OPEC's time in the sun might be waning.
Ms. Jablonski, a Slovakian who grew up in West Texas when her geologist father took a job with Vacuum Oil, knew instinctively how to cajole important people into giving her more information than they'd planned. She worked on their egos, challenged their statements and held a true dialogue, rather than just a question-and-answer session.
She mastered the most important reporting skill: trading information. Government officials and key executives who refused to be interviewed by anyone else would meet periodically with Ms. Jablonski to gain valuable insight and to use her as a messenger for their views.
All of this might make a college journalism ethics professor wince. It's one thing to trade information, but another to help a source refine his views and present them to the public.
And Ms. Jablonski had a definite ethical lapse when she started a consulting business on the side. Her clients paid her for private consultations on the industry gossip and insight that she would normally use for her reporting and writing.
Still, Ms. Jablonski didn't bow to her sources. She bravely published articles that, she knew, would anger even her closest friends and result in canceled subscriptions to Petroleum Intelligence Weekly.
In the end, even Exxon chairman Ken Jamieson came crawling back. Exxon canceled corporate subscriptions to protest a major scoop by one of Ms. Jablonski's reporters on changes to production contracts between Arab countries and Big Oil but eventually resubscribed.
Ms. Jablonski's information was simply too valuable to miss.
-- By ELIZABETH SOUDER / The Dallas Morning News
Read Article: www.guidelive.com back to top
PopMatters.com September 4, 2008:
A resolution of the Arab-Israeli crisis, with Israel returning the land it had occupied since 1967, was critical. "What do we want? ... A Soviet-Union-U.S. showdown in the Middle East? Or do we want to send troops in to get the Arab oil? Then we'll have a showdown and no oil."
So said influential oil reporter Wanda Jablonski in an interview with the Christian Science Monitor in 1973 after the Arab oil embargo.
It's 2008 and there are troops from the US, Britain, and other countries in Iraq and no oil. Recently, it was revealed in the New York Times that, despite no agreement yet in Iraq's parliament for disbursing oil revenues, several Western companies will be awarded contracts for extracting oil from Iraq. It's notable that the Russian and Chinese companies that had made agreements with the Hussein regime for those same services are to be excluded.
In defense of the awarding of these contracts, Phillip J. Carroll, a Pentagon-backed adviser to the Iraqi Oil Ministry and a former head of Shell's operations in the United States, told the New York Times, "These companies are long familiar with Iraq and have wonderful technology and loads of money," he said. "The Iraqis could develop their own skills by learning from the international oil companies."
Nevermind that Iraq has been pumping and refining oil for decades. Reading Anna Rubino's well-done biography of trail-blazing reporter Jablonski makes it abundantly clear that Carroll's patronizing attitude towards Iraq is the same as what Western oil executives have had towards the Middle East for decades. It's also an attitude that Jablonski, through her reporting for Petroleum Week, and then later at her own highly influential (and often indispensable) Petroleum Intelligence Weekly, sought to undo.
To understand the life and career of Jablonski is to understand how control over oil production in the Middle East slowly shifted from a handful of colluding western oil companies known as the Seven Sisters to the governments of those oil-producing countries, and the formation of OPEC. Jablonski's role was so prominent within the oil business that she was given the nickname "OPEC's Midwife". One must also understand how access to secure supplies of oil has been a major component in the foreign policy of the United States and Great Britain since the end of World War II.
Born in Trnava, Sovakia in 1920 to a Slovakian mother and Polish father, Jablonski was their first and only child. Her father, Eugen, worked as a geologist for oil companies. She and her mother, Maria, traveled with Eugen wherever his job took him; places like Germany, Egypt, Texas, and even New Zealand (where no oil was found).
It was thanks to this upbringing that Jablonski had an intimate knowledge of how oil was found, extracted, and refined. After graduating from Cornell University during World War II, she put this knowledge to use in the pages of the New York Journal of Commerce. Jablonski jumped into the slot vacated by the paper's regular oil reporter and soon landed a number of front page stories.
Jablonski uncovered how the secretive oil companies set prices and often sold oil at below the stated market price. She revealed oil finds before the companies had planned to reveal them. It was later, while writing for Petroleum Week and Petroleum Intelligence Weekly, that she provided a forum for the points of view of decision-makers in oil-producing countries.
By allowing oil ministers in countries like Saudi Arabia (Abdullah Tariki) and Venezuela (Juan Pablo Perez Alfonso) to air their views without being caricatured as raving oil nationalists (as they were in large-circulation print media like the Wall Street Journal and BusinessWeek), she gained their trust. This in turn allowed her unprecedented access to leaders in Saudi Arabi, Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, and other parts of the Middle East.
She chronicled their attempts to gain more of a say in how their nations' resources were developed, especially in their decades-long battle for a more equitable share of oil revenues. She also had the trust of top oil executives due to her deep understanding of the oil business and her willingness to hold onto information that was "off the record".
Jablonski's career was remarkable, not simply because of its reporting and publishing brilliance. That she got the stories she did, becoming a trusted reporter to businessmen and oil ministers when women were uncommon in both newsrooms and boardrooms, makes her accomplishments all the more astonishing. Rubino does a superb job of documenting Jablonski's long and influential career and placing her accomplishments against the time and place in which they were achieved. Jablonski's drive to get the stories no one else could get created a captivating life story that Rubino has made clear and accessible for all to read. back to top
How Oil Prices Could Collapse
Do you think $140 a barrel is insane? Last week the president of OPEC Chakib Khelil predicted $170 a
If that pans out, it would mean the world will need to burn more than 120 million barrels of oil that day. We have it, but can we afford it? Nope, and that is why the oil domain is crumbling.
Hundred of thousands of hybrid cars are being disgorged from Japan to Europe, deeply cutting gasoline use. Those who dismissed solar energy a decade ago as esoteric now embrace it. Fly over entire countries like Israel and Cyprus and much of southern Europe, all with plenty of sun but no oil, and watch millions of solar panel reflectors stare back at you.
And that big bad wolf of energy, nuclear, will come back. It has already saved Europe's economies from successive ravages of oil. Massively adopted forty years ago as the energy solution by France, the world's fifth ranking economy, nuclear today produces seventy percent of that country's electricity and huge exports to Europe.
There will be a monopoly for oil until we invent something else that can move the car engine. But even General Motors is hard at work on an alternative engine because at $5 a gallon money talks.
Efforts redoubled elsewhere into coal and wind, with these giant wind energy columns now peppering landscapes across Europe and even in oily Texas.
As it happened before, alternatives will crack this energy gig. Right now the world of oil is split among new provinces like America, Canada, and the North Sea -- which have given much of what they have -- and old provinces like OPEC, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela, where the rest of the stuff lies.
This is where the rubber is hitting the asphalt and producing mind-boggling prices. As we run out of the "secure" province supplies located under Western control, we are falling to oil controlled by potentates and failed regimes.
The North Sea oil, for example, was discovered in the 1960s between the UK and Norway. Oil companies under international contracts flung that territorial sea wide open, taking it all the way up to a peak of six million barrels a day in 1999 from virtually zero in 1970. They worked under universal rules of law. These are not the rules by which Saudi Arabia and OPEC play.
The same oil companies working in Saudi Arabia discovered all that oil in the 1930s and 1940s and set up production until nationalized and kicked out as partners in the 1970s. They now work there only as hired hands. As a result potential production of millions of barrels is locked down. The same goes for OPEC.
To be sure readers of this column have argued these are capitalist rules -- their oil, their move. But globalization demands leveled playing fields, not monopolies. What is sure is that the time for an alternative to oil is now.
And it can break the bank as it did before. Back in 1973 Arab oil producers led by Saudi Arabia imposed a cutoff of oil to the USA and Europe. Prices shot up to the equivalent of $100 a barrel in today's dollars and we were familiarized with what is known as the global oil crisis. While some menaced war, oil companies took off looking for new provinces and found them -- like the North Sea, which started pumping from zero in 1971 all the way up to its six million barrel a day peak of 1999. So much new oil was found elsewhere that OPEC's share of world supplies dropped to forty percent from nearly sixty percent.
And prices collapsed as a result, until they resumed their climb two years ago.
Wanda knew it and said it too often. That's the legendary Wanda Jablonski, whose life as a prescient journalist, business editor, and publisher is being grandly celebrated this week with a new book properly titled Queen of the Oil Club, by Anna Rubino.
Reading the book, it becomes clear that we heard it all before but did not pay attention. Although Wanda had a weakness for those oilmen who run the business, she always posed the alternate question. She was so insistent a voice in raising questions about oilmen and their world that they had a less flattering moniker than "queen of their club," giggling that she was a "buster" of a delicate part of male anatomy.
As you read Wanda's story and that of the oil she singlehandedly turned from a simple commodity into "black gold" and the stuff of global crises and wars, you can pick up the message: look for the alternative, now.
-- Youssef M. Ibrahim
Read Article and comments: www.pajamasmedia.com back to top
Winston-Salem Journal Review: July 7, 2008
Biography is a history of Mideast oil's growth.
Anna Rubino has four children -- three girls and a book.
For much of the time that she and her husband, Richard Schneider, have been raising their three daughters -- Laurian, 22, Caroline, 20, and Elena, 17 -- Rubino was working on a biography of a pioneer journalist by the name of Wanda Jablonski.
After a while, Rubino said, it came to feel as if she had a fourth child. That said, she put her family first and often had to work on the book at odd times, such as after the girls were tucked in for the night, and from time to time, family responsibilities required her to set aside the project.
But the years didn't diminish her passion for her subject.
Michele Gillespie, the associate provost for academic initiatives at Wake Forest University, is in a writing group with Rubino. As she put it, "She found a way with the demands of raising a family in the 21st century to keep her Muse alive."
Finally finished
And, now, Queen of the Oil Club: The Intrepid Wanda Jablonski and the Power of Information is out. The book tells the story of a woman who began reporting on the international oil business in the 1950s, years before OPEC (the Organization of Oil Exporting Countries) existed. At that time, a group of seven American, British and Dutch companies known as the Seven Sisters controlled nearly half of the world's oil trade.
Women were so rare in the oil world that sheikhs sometime held interviews with Jablonski in their harems, the only place women were allowed. Some of the Middle Eastern oil producers didn't know quite what to make of her, Rubino said, but they came to respect her.
"She talked to them as though they were equals," she said. "Most of the Westerners they talked to were talking down to them."
When she began reporting, she used her initials instead of her first name to hide the fact that she was a woman. By the late 1950s, though, Jablonski was known throughout the oil world simply as Wanda because there was no other Wanda she could possibly be confused with, and many regard her as the midwife of OPEC's creation.
Her connections made her a valuable source of information for everyone. In 1961, Jablonski founded her own newsletter, Petroleum Intelligence Weekly, charging subscribers $365 a year, or, as she like to say, just a dollar a day.
Her personal life had its upheavals, and she could be hard to work for. But she had the tenacity to ferret out information that powerful people weren't always eager to have known.
"What she was was a brilliant reporter," Rubino said.
Sometimes, oil executives would be so outraged by a story that they would cancel their company's subscriptions only to have to renew them later because they couldn't afford to be without the information she provided.
"Wanda was like the Internet of her day," Rubino said. "She showed that information does have power."
Daniel Yergin, the author of the Pulitzer-Prize-winning The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power, wrote the foreword for the book. In an e-mail, he said, "In addition to being a great story, Queen of the Oil Club is a must read at $140 a barrel.... Through this history, she really helps to make sense of how we got to today's $4 gasoline.
"I decided to write the introduction not only because of Wanda Jablonksi herself but also because I really admire the biography. It's irresistible."
Professional journalist
Rubino is a professional journalist, and, over the years, she has written for such publications as Business Week, McGraw-Hill World News and the International Herald Tribune. She met Jablonski in the 1980s in New York while working for Petroleum Intelligence Weekly. Jablonski died in 1992.
Since Rubino's husband became a professor at the Wake Forest University School of Law 15 years ago, she has been living in Winston-Salem. For the past six years, she has been working for OTR Global, an investment news service based in San Francisco, as a reporter specializing in the natural-food business.
She wanted to tell Jablonski's story in part, she said, because she thinks that Jablonski's professional life serves as an example to her daughters.
"I think it's, inspiring" Rubino said, "to see someone on their own achieve such a position of influence, particularly that she was able to do it in an extraordinarily masculine world."
Rubino's father was an officer in the Central Intelligence Agency, and she grew up in such European cities as Berlin and Brussels. She attended the University of Paris (Sorbonne) and earned a bachelor's degree at Vassar College in New York. She has two master's degrees from Yale University. Jablonski was the subject of her doctoral dissertation in history at Yale. She thought that a larger audience would be interested in Jablonski's story, and, after she received the doctorate in 2002, she went to work writing a biography.
Telling Jablonski's story was possible, Rubino said, because so many prominent people in the oil world were eager to have it told and readily agreed to interviews. By the time she was done, she had interviewed more than 100 people.
"Anna Rubino is a great reporter," Yergin said. "She was an ingenious and relentless sleuth in tracking down the truths of Wanda Jablonski's mysterious life."
Rubino has a gift not only for reporting but also for writing, Gillespie said. "Her narrative is absolutely compelling.... She is really an artist."
-- Kim Underwood
Read Article: www.journalnow.com back to top
Winston Salem Journal Feature September 4, 2008:
Rubino's book is a portrait of Wanda Jablonski, who reported on the oil industry from the 1940s to the 1980s. In her book, Rubino explains how Jablonski started out as a reporter in the 1940s, at a time when business reporting was still in its infancy and women reporters were not accepted. For this reason, Jablonski disguised her name with the byline of "W.M. Jablonski," so she would not reveal her gender.
Within a decade, Jablonski solidified her reputation as the best reporter on the oil industry. Jablonski went to the oil epicenters of the world, digging for good stories and interviews, often scooping other reporters, including reporters with The New York Times, a paper she desperately wanted to be a part of. Jablonski's travels took her to Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq and Kuwait, where she was the unlikely champion of downtrodden governments struggling to control their oil resources.
Rubino writes that Jablonksi founded the Petroleum Intelligence Weekly, which became the leading industry newsletter on oil. When the newsletter came out in 1961, it carried the hefty subscription rate of $1 a day, or $365 a year. Jablonksi jokingly said, if my information is good people will pay the price, and if it is bad, then no one will take it at any price.
Rubino explains how Jablonski uncovered the trends of the Western financiers who managed the seven largest oil companies, or "Big Oil," and that they controlled the supply of oil to the world. Many of the oil execs she took on begrudgingly read Jablonksi's newsletter, simply because it was an unfettered glimpse into the world of oil.
Jablonksi extensively reported on the creation of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries; she was even referred to as being the "midwife of OPEC." The consortium of exporters was created as a way to control the ever-fluctuating prices of oil.
Rubino has written an authoritative book. She worked for Jablonski at the PIW, and it is clear all the way through that she understands Jablonksi's committed coverage of the oil industry. Rubino does an excellent job of revealing the stories that Jablonski wrote, and how they came to shape not only the countries she wrote about, but the oil industry as a whole.
The book is beautifully written, very interesting and thoroughly enjoyable. In an unpredictable time for oil prices, with the war in Iraq and a bevy of countries needing large amounts of oil for industrialization efforts, Rubino's book gives a fair analysis of the modern era of oil.
Erik Spencer is a writer and reviewer who lives in Walnut Cove. back to top
Queen of the Oil Club recommended as summer reading:
RGJ.com: July 16, 2008 -- "Queen of the Oil Club: The Intrepid Wanda Jablonski and the Power of Information" by Anna Rubino (Beacon Press, $29.95 hardcover) is the biography of Wanda Jablonski, a journalist, publisher, and power broker so influential in the oil world that she was called the mid-wife of OPEC, the Sundance staff said. Jablonksi challenged the control of the oil titans and became the most powerful woman in this most powerful of industries.
Read Article: www.rgj.com
Winston-Salem Journal: July 11, 2008 -- Written by a Winston-Salem writer, Oil Club is the story of a gutsy female reporter who cast light on the backroom dealings of Western oil executives during the 1950s to the 1980s. Hendricks likes books about strong female role models for her students. She also calls it a "timely book with gas and oil and all of these issues on our nation's mind. It's heavy at times, but she tells it as a biography that has a really quick, page-turning story."
Read Article: www.journalnow.com
"Wanda Jablonski was one of a kind--a reporter who revealed the secret world of the oil business, a woman who penetrated the inner sanctums of the Arab oil sheiks, and an entrepreneur who created a publication that was the industry's bible. Jablonski's colorful career comes alive in Anna Rubino's richly reported memoir."
--David Ignatius, columnist for The Washington Post and author of Body of Lies: A Novel
"A page-turner and a substantive biography, Queen of the Oil Club makes Middle East oil history come alive through the eyes of a truly trailblazing woman journalist."
--Ambassador Connie Morella, former Congresswoman from Maryland
"A gem of a book about a remarkable woman and the shadowy world of oil and global politics. Anna Rubino has followed in Wanda Jablonski's footsteps, mining the data, and presenting a fascinating story. "
--Rachel Bronson, author of Thicker than Oil: America's Uneasy Partnership with Saudi Arabia
"Part detective story and part political thriller, Queen of the Oil Club is the true account of the most influential woman of the early oil age. It's a book you can't miss."
--Gregg Easterbrook, author of The Progress Paradox
"What a fascinating story and what a remarkable woman! Before women were even allowed to join the National Press Club, Wanda Jablonski managed, through determination, hard work, and excellent reporting, to overcome the odds and become one of the most influential journalists in our history. Jablonski not only chronicled the growth of the oil industry, she helped shape it--and brought oil barons to their knees."
--Bill Press, political commentator, author, and radio host of The Bill Press Show