The Prize

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, , 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.

Energy consultant Yergin limns oil's central role in most of the wars and many international crises of the 20th century. "A timely, information-packed, authoritative history of the petroleum industry, tracing its ramifications, national and geopolitical, to the present day," said PW. Photos. Author tour.

Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

This book does not require recent events in the Persian Gulf to make it an essential addition for most public libraries as well as all college libraries. Written by one of the foremost U.S. authorities on energy, it is a major work in the field, replete with enough insight to satisfy the scholar and sufficient concern with the drama and colorful personalities in the history of oil to capture the interest of the general public. Though lengthy, the book never drags in developing its themes: the relationship of oil to the rise of modern capitalism; the intertwining relations between oil, politics, and international power; and the relationship between oil and society in what Yergin calls today's age of "Hydrocarbon Man." Parts of the story have been told as authoritatively before, e.g., in Irvine Anderson's Aramco: The United States and Saudi Arabia ( LJ 7/81), but never in as comprehensive a fashion as here.

- Joseph R. Rudolph Jr., Towson State Univ., Md.

Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Impassioned and riveting...only in the great epics of Homer will readers regularly run into a comparable string of larger-than-life swashbucklers and statesmen, heroes and villains.

A compelling and comprehensive history. . . . [Yergin] writes quiet unexaggerated prose, comprehensible to non-specialists, and artfully manages vast research . . . his narrative proceeds like a developing photograph of our times.

Splendid and epic...brilliantly told.

James Schlesinger

former U.S. Secretary of Defense and U.S. Secretary of Energy

A masterly narrative...The Prize portrays the interweaving of national and corporate interests, the conflicts and stratagems, the miscalculations, the follies, and the ironies.

The Boston Sunday Globe

Pure narrative history, spun out as a tremendously exciting epic covering nearly six generations.

San Francisco Examiner

Impassioned and riveting...only in the great epics of Homer will readers regularly run into a comparable string of larger-than-life swashbucklers and statesmen, heroes and villains.

The Wall Street Journal

Splendid and epic...brilliantly told.

The Wall Street Journal Splendid and epic...brilliantly told.