Crude: The Story of Oil

(Hardback)

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Crude is the unexpurgated story of oil, from the circumstances of its birth millions of years ago, to the spectacle of its rise as the indispensible ingredient of modern life. In addition to fueling cars and illuminating cities, crude oil and its byproducts fertilise produce, pave roads and make plastic possible. The modern world is drenched in oil; the story of how this came to be is a great human drama of discovery and innovation, risk, the promise of riches and the unconquerable power of greed.

Reviews

This is not a Michael Moorestyle anti-corporate rantShah writes beautifully, with dispassionate, elegant clarityand it is all the more powerful for it. The Guardian

Sonia Shah deftly [shows] how the oil companies' relentless pursuit of new fields to exploit has led them to drill for oil in some of the most impoverished and unstable areas of the world particularly eloquent on the despoliation of the Delta region of southern Nigeria. Michael Klare,The Nation

Though Shah could have easily written a laundry list on the disruptions Big Oil and its government cohorts continue to wreak, this volume is more than thatit is an insightful missive to her readers to understand their consumptive reality. Clamor Magazine

Author Bio

SONIA SHAH edited both the critically acclaimed Dragon Ladies: Asian American Feminists Breathe Fire and Between Fear and Hope: A Decade of Peace Activism. A former editor at South End Press and Nuclear Times Magazine, Shah is an independent journalist whose writing appears in The Nation, The Progressive, Salon, and elsewhere.