An insider’s view on blockbuster deal-making and part cultural tour de force, An Improbable Odyssey is a one-of-a-kind, deeply textured account of how some of the greatest artists of all time pushed to realize their greatest ambitions—with the help of Charles Lubar.
The year was 1971. Thirty-year-old Charles Lubar, a Washington, D.C.–born Harvard Law School graduate with a two-and-a-half-year deep dive in the Chief Counsel’s Office of the Internal Revenue Service recently behind him, was floundering in Nairobi, Kenya where he had come to seek the kind of high-stakes adventures one could never find at a major law firm in the U.S. But with his entrepreneurial hopes quashed in Nairobi by an environment that hardly wrapped its arms around outsiders, Indians being expelled from Kenya, and Idi Amin—the ruthless despot—on the brink of taking over in neighboring Uganda and soon to wreak havoc throughout the region, Lubar decided to pick