The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power Author: | Language: English | ISBN:
B001GX9W5Y | Format: EPUB
The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power Description
The Prize recounts the panoramic history of oil, and the struggle for wealth and power that has always surrounded oil. This struggle has shaken the world economy, dictated the outcome of wars, and transformed the destiny of men and nations.
The Prize is as much a history of the 20th-century as of the oil industry itself. The canvas of this history is enormous - from the drilling of the first well in Pennsylvania through two great world wars to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and Operation Desert Storm.
The cast extends from wildcrafters and rogues to oil tycoons, and from Winston Churchill and Ibn Saud to George Bush and Saddam Hussein.
The definitive work on the subject of oil and a major contribution to understanding our century, The Prize is a book of extraordinary breadth, riveting excitement--and great importance.
- Audible Audio Edition
- Listening Length: 2 hours and 51 minutes
- Program Type: Audiobook
- Version: Abridged
- Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
- Audible.com Release Date: September 26, 2008
- Language: English
- ASIN: B001GX9W5Y
The Prize is one of the best books I've ever read. I wish I could give it a couple of bonus stars in my rating here.
You'd really be selling this book short to think of it just as a history of oil, the oil business, and oil politics in the middle east. Even that would have been an ambitious book but Yergin makes it so much more. It honestly is a thorough history of the entire 20th century (sans the 90s) viewed through the perspective of the oil industry.
As each chapter, era, decade, and war unfolds in Yergin's story, you'll gain a much better understanding of the roots of many of the US public's stances on big business, anti-trust legislation, and other pivotal issues of the last 100 years. You'll see how pivotal energy resources were in shaping the planning and rationale for 2 world wars and how the ready availability or lack of oil played as much of a role in winning and losing those wars as did battlefield strategies and the valor of the millions of soldiers involved. You'll see the role oil and energy played in the final collapse of the great imperial powers.
Probably most relevant to 2007, the lessons Yergin teaches about middle east history, the changing power roles the evolved in the last 50-60 years as the power shifted from the oil companies to the oil producing countries. Tracing the roots of nationalization of oil production in Mexico and Venezuela is a great stepping stone to understanding out current relationship with Venezuela but it also properly frames the story of the origins of OPEC and OPEC policies.
My interest in Daniel Yergin's "The Prize" was piqued earlier in the year, when energy, not terrorism, was the most pressing domestic problem. For an economy that had gotten so caught up with the intangibles, with over-hyped, un-real products (haven't we all had enough of "e-business solutions?"), it was refreshing to study an industry dealing with a very tangible product whose supply is so essential to the survival of our economy itself.
"The Prize" traces the history of oil from its humble, entrepreneurial beginnings in the hillsides of western Pennsylvania, to the shrewd domination of the industry by John D. Rockefeller, to the breakup of Standard Oil, and through the discovery of oil in the farthest flung corners of the globe. Part of Yergin's history is something of a tragedy: the gradual seizure of oil from the voyagers who discovered it by national governments who were able to use their seizures to threaten the West during the 1973 oil shock and beyond. In this one very big instance, third world governments really did take on multinational corporations -- and defeated them.
Yergin chronicles how oil went from a freewheeling business of refiners and speculators to an instrument of great geopolitical importance, one where nation-states played at least as great a role in shaping the industry as the oil companies did. In this transition, anything could -- and did -- happen. Rock bottom prices threatened the survival of oil producers one year, and sky-high prices forced drastic changes in consumer behavior the next (indeed, "The Prize" does give one a crystal-clear view of the price mechanism). Nightmare scenarios involving the political manipulation of oil did indeed come to pass in 1973, in 1979, and during the Gulf War.
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