Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Steve Coll won the 2012 Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year for his book, Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power.

Follow the links below to read free samples of the shortlisted business books. The winner was unveiled at the award dinner at The Mandarin Oriental Hotel in New York. Coll earned a £30,000 (about $48,711) prize, and the other shortlisted authors received £10,000 (about $16,237).

Here’s more from the release: “The book is a hard-hitting investigation of the notoriously secretive ExxonMobil Corporation, beginning with the Exxon Valdez accident in 1989 and closing with the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.”

The panel of judges included Clayton, Dubilier & Rice partner Vindi Banga, London Business School professor Lynda Gratton, American Action Forum president Douglas Holtz-Eakin, U.S. SEC former chairman Arthur Levitt, Royal Dutch Shell chairman Jorma Ollila, Shriti Vadera Ltd director Shriti Vadera and Goldman Sachs Group CEO Lloyd C. Blankfein

Free Samples of the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award Shortlist

Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson (Crown Business, Profile Books)

The Hour Between Dog and Wolf: Risk-taking, Gut Feelings and the Biology of Boom and Bust by John Coates (The Penguin Press, Fourth Estate)

Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power by Steve Coll (The Penguin Press, Allen Lane)

Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography by Walter Isaacson (Simon & Schuster; Little, Brown)

What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits Of Markets by Michael J. Sandel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Allen Lane)

Volcker: The Triumph of Persistence by William L. Silber (Bloomsbury Press)