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.”

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Raghuram G. Rajan won the Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award for his book, Fault Lines. A £30,000 prize (approximately $47,300) accompanied the award.

The ceremony and dinner took place at New York’s famous Pierre hotel. During his acceptance speech he praised his publisher, Princeton University Press. Rajan said his wife had advised him on making the book easy-to-read. He thanked his two children, joking that had it not been for them, the book would have been written much faster.

The president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, Vartan Gregorian delivered the evening’s keynote address. He mentioned the Harry Potter series, the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, Mark Twain, and T.S. Eliot.

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