Welcome to the ProPublica Book Club! We’ve never tried anything like this before. But that’s because we’ve never done a story quite like this before. It’s the longest piece of journalism that we’ve ever published — about 20,000 words. That’s super long for a news story. But it’s super short for a book. So we figured we’d try to treat it like one. Hence, the book club.

We know your time is precious. Rather than asking you to read a story this long in one sitting, we’ll send you an email each week with a link to the next chapter (seven in all). Along the way, I’ll point out some moments of the story that I thought were especially interesting. And I’ll provide you some insight on how the reporting was done. It’s a tale in its own right. There were secret State Department cables and Firestone documents, lunches with former rebel commanders, long-silent Firestone managers who came forward, and an interview with Liberia’s president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.

We also hope the book club will be a space for good, lively and civil discussions. To that end, we’ve crafted questions for each chapter that we’ll be discussing here each week. Ready to get started?

Sign up now for our book club email series or jump into this week’s discussion below.

Current Chapter: Deal with the Devil

Get inside the confidential discussions of Firestone’s top corporate executives as they figure out the key to doing business with a warlord. Read Chapter 4

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Coming soon:

5. Money and Menace
6. Raining Hell
7. A Traumatized Nation