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Summary:
Daniel Yergin's first prize-winning book, Shattered Peace, was a history of the Cold War. Afterwards the young academic star joined the energy project of the Harvard Business School and wrote the best-seller Energy Future. Following on from there, The Prize, winner of the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction, is a comprehensive history of one of the commodities that powers the world--oil. Founded in the 19th century, the oil industry began producing kerosene for lamps and progressed to gasoline. Huge personal fortunes arose from it, and whole nations sprung out of the power politics of the oil wells. Yergin's fascinating account sweeps from early robber barons like John D. Rockefeller, to the oil crisis of the 1970s, through to the Gulf War.
Customer Reviews:
Average Customer Rating:
A Must to Read!
Customer Rating:
This book was published in 1992 so it doesn't contain information beyond the Bush presidency and into the 21st Century. What it contains is the history of the use of oil as a means of energy and light. While Oil does appear in the background of many history textbooks, its history is ignored even as it gradually takes over the lives of most on the planet Earth. This book covers the period in which oil is discovered to be a better source of light than whale oil and cheap enough to be used by the general public. Kerosene changes lives. No longer do people feel force to go to bed once the sun goes down and rise when it comes up, but to actually do somethings at night especially in the rural areas. The danger of transporting kerosene pails in the light of profits and a better standard of living. Later the internal combustion engine is invented using oil as the combustion source and oil takes flight. This book is also great at revealing how the World Wars were able to expand and focus on greater transportation, weapons and technology due to the expanding use of oil. It also affected where people fought and what they fought over. The lack of oil may have helped damn the Nazis from taking over all of Europe. This book is very good at explaining how oil has affected lives. The details on the Carter Administration and the Gulf War are fascinating. This book won a well deserved Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction. I highly recommend it and would like to see the PBS series also.
The History of Oil!
Customer Rating:
This is the standard. Michael Yergin, now the CEO of Cambridge Energy Research Associates, in 1991 wrote this tomb which is the defacto standard text and reference for anyone interested in reading about the history of oil.
This is a meticulously researched book which chronicles the rise of oil from Pennsylvania through the present. Yergin weaves a comprehensive chronological narrative of how the modern oil industry came into existence. This work from Michael Yergin won the Pulitzer Prize to boot.
There are numerous books on oil. Many focus on peak oil. Some focus on the tyranny or how the industry is downright evil. This book though is all about the facts. College history professors could use this book. It presents the facts and the history and lets the reader reach any conclusions they want.
Beware though, this is not light reading. Sometimes it reads very fast and sometimes you muddle through it depending on what aspect of the oil industry you're interested in.
After studying this work the reader will be able to intelligently speak about the history of oil and see through many of the shallower and erroneous assumptions people make about the industry.
If you have to buy 1 and only 1 book on oil. Get The Prize by Yergin.
An Overwrought Encyclopedia
Customer Rating:
The first 200 pages of "The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power" are compelling and fascinating because they are about the compelling and fascinating characters who created the modern oil industry. There is, of course, John D. Rockefeller whose organizational genius permitted the rise of Standard Oil, the antecedent of today's Exxon-Mobil. Then there is the hopelessly disorganized but very lucky British merchant Marcus Samuel who founded Shell, and the meticulous and disciplined Dutchman Henri Deterding who would turn it into Standard Oil's global competitor.
Oil's early pioneers sustain the early narrative but as we progress further into Daniel Yergin's 788-page tome the author's fundamental weaknesses as a writer are all too apparent. First there is his clunky writing style, so clunky in fact that the writing doesn't feel edited. Second Mr. Yergin chooses to talk about everything and about everyone, and so this book is more encyclopedia than narrative -- and it's very discomforting to read an encyclopedia structured as a chronological narrative. Third is how Mr. Yergin insists on the equal importance of his many characters -- in his estimate there is not a handful of founders of the modern oil industry but dozens. Fourth there is Mr. Yergin's insistence on the primacy of oil, leading him to make simplistic arguments such as that World War II was fundamentally battles over oil (it's very true that war is about resources and logistics but oil is only one resource).
A lot of these problems stem from the fact that Mr. Yergin really doesn't know that much about oil (Yes, I know it says on the back that he's an "authority on world affairs and the oil business"!). He ignores the environmental problems with oil, and doesn't at all mention the excellent and disturbing point that the documentary "Eleventh Hour" makes so explicit: that oil is captured sunshine, and by living off oil today we are essentially living off the past and mortgaging the future. "The Prize" has no original research, and feels like a hastily put together of newspaper clippings and books. The book's final 200 pages especially feel this way, and are just unreadable. What is the point of regurgitating the events leading up to the Suez Canal Crisis, the Iran-Iraq War, and other late twentieth-century crises that any reader who chooses to pick up a 788-page book on oil would already know about?
Mr. Yergin would have served his readers better to focus on the oil industry's early pioneers, and to trace how their corporate descendants have fared in the modern world. His tracing of the founding of OPEC to the Texas Railroad Commission's containment of the Texas oil glut in the 1920s is very interesting and informative. And if Mr. Yergin had more of these examples connecting the past to the present "The Prize" would be an informative narrative instead of the overwrought encyclopedia it is now.
the truth behind gas prices
Customer Rating:
Very informative. If legislators would have read this book back in 1992 we would be energy independent today. Oil is used as a weapon against America, the free World and it's citizens. Even the "Big 5" oil companies (Exxon Mobil, Royal Dutch Shell, BP Arco, Chevron, Conoco Phillips)who operate in America and import oil from the Middle East are putting America and Americans at risk. As the author of, The Truth Behind Gas Prices, I say it is time to get energy independent. The Prize will not tell you how we can do this, but my book will.
Richard Clough www.thetruthbehindgasprices.com
The Necessary Political and Economic Lubricant
Customer Rating:
The recent and tumultuous situation with petroleum pricing, coupled with the obviously baleful effects on the environment of hydrocarbon fuels, combined with rising demands, diminishing supplies, economic turmoil in the world economy and sourcing from the ever-unstable Middle East prompted me to re-read Daniel Yergin's masterpiece, "The Prize".
While everyone has an opinion on petroleum pricing and usage, ranging from simple-minded conspiracy theories to empirical invocations of "market economies", no one outside "the business" can legitimately lay claim to having an informed opinion on the topic without having carefully read this book.
As is often the case in history, there is an annoyingly repetitious flavor to the story. Fluctuations in petroleum supply/demand ratios, wildly variable pricing, toxic waste accumulation, political machinations, corporate manipulation, Cassandra-like warnings of the dire implications of reliance on hydrocarbon-based energy, attempts to formulate national and international strategies...its all been stated, argued and ignored since the 1930s. As US Interior Secretary Harold Ickes caustically remarked during the War, "It is impossible to carry the American people along with you on a program of caution to forestall a threatening position." Yergin noted that, "Prevention, whether it be an ounce or a pound was bad politics..." Of course, the same holds true now, as then.
The insights into the "culture" of the oil magnates as well as those of the governments who sometimes worked with them (whilst simultaneously indicting them for "collusion", as did the US Justice Department); the motives of the Middle Eastern oil producers; the founding of OPEC (largely instigated by a Venezualan with Spartan tastes combined with ecological sympathies) and the re-appearance of the same confusion and mixed motives by virtually the same cast of players who currently occupy the stage are all brilliantly detailed in this book.
As for the writing, Yergin writes in an engaging and interesting style. Of course, there are some tedious sections in this very long book, but it certainly holds the interest of the motivated, non-technical reader.
In summary, this book, while written almost twenty years ago, remains important and timely at the close of the second decade of the 21st century. It is necessary background for understanding the current state of the world economy.
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