The Prize fares best as straight commercial history: the story of the great, globe-girdling enterprises built upon the discovery of the properties of long-dead plant matter. Instead, it is a heavy mass of often shapeless information entwined around a fairly familiar historical core. Unfortunately, The Prize does not begin to come to grips with the issues which according to its author we need to confront if “hydrocarbon civilization”-meaning, more or less, life as we in the West know it-is to resolve its many contradictions.
By extension, how the Western world deals with its relationship to oil is a key to how the West will deal with Everything. Its thesis is that crude oil now lies at the bottom of Everything: not only industrial organization, but entire forms of civilization. The Prize claims to be an epic narrative, a history of what Yergin calls “the age of oil”-i.e., our age. Yergin, president of Cambridge Energy Research Associates, billed as a leading authority on world affairs and the oil business, indefatigable proselytizer for alternative energy scenarios, has offered up a major disappointment.
Would that the book itself rose to the occasion. With Kuwait kidnapped, and roughly one million U.S., allied, and Iraqi troops poised to shoot, history conspired to make his sprawling, heavily documented work about the centrality of petroleum to the modern world order supremely topical and compelling. The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power.ĭaniel Yergin’s timing could hardly have been better.
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