Download or read book Crude written by Sonia Shah and published by Seven Stories Press. This book was released on 2011-01-04 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 indispensable ingredient of modern life. In addition to fueling our SUVs and illuminating our cities, crude oil and its byproducts fertilize our produce, pave our roads, and make plastic possible. "Newborn babies," observes author Sonia Shah, "slide from their mothers into petro-plastic-gloved hands, are swaddled in petro-polyester blankets, and are hurried off to be warmed by oil-burning heaters." The modern world is drenched in oil; Crude tells how it came to be. A great human drama emerges, of discovery and innovation, risk, the promise of riches, and the power of greed. Shah infuses recent twists in the story with equal drama, through chronicles of colorful modern-day characters — from the hundreds of Nigerian women who stormed a Chevron plant to a monomaniacal scientist for whom life is the pursuit of this earthblood and its elusive secret. Shah moves masterfully between scientific, economic, political, and social analysis, capturing the many sides of the indispensable mineral that we someday may have to find a way to live without.
Download or read book Oil Power and War written by Matthieu Auzanneau and published by Chelsea Green Publishing. This book was released on 2020-02-20 with total page 674 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of oil is one of hubris, fortune, betrayal, and destruction. It is the story of a resource that has been undeniably central to the creation of our modern culture, and ever-present during the darkest exploits of empire the world over. For the past 150 years, oil has become the most essential ingredient for economic, military, and political power. And it has brought us to our present moment in which political leaders and the fossil-fuel industry consider extraordinary, and extraordinarily dangerous, policy on a world stage marked by shifting power bases. Upending the conventional wisdom by crafting a “people’s history,” award-winning journalist Matthieu Auzanneau deftly traces how oil became a national and then global addiction, outlines the enormous consequences of that addiction, sheds new light on major historical and contemporary figures, and raises new questions about stories we thought we knew well: What really sparked the oil crises in the 1970s, the shift away from the gold standard at Bretton Woods, or even the financial crash of 2008? How has oil shaped the events that have defined our times: two world wars, the Cold War, the Great Depression, ongoing wars in the Middle East, the advent of neoliberalism, and the Great Recession, among them? With brutal clarity, Oil, Power, and War exposes the heavy hand oil has had in all of our lives—and illustrates how much heavier that hand could get during the increasingly desperate race to control the last of the world’s easily and cheaply extractable reserves.
Download or read book Death and Oil written by Bradford Matsen and published by Pantheon. This book was released on 2011 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Documents the events of the 1988 oil rig disaster on the North Sea, drawing on interviews with survivors and family members, the Occidental Petroleum Corp., and rescue workers to trace the gas leak that triggered the explosion and the devastation it continues to inflict.
Download or read book Black Gold written by Albert Marrin and published by Knopf Books for Young Readers. This book was released on 2013-01-08 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Oil is not pretty, but it is a resource that drives the modern world. It has made fortunes for the lucky few and provided jobs for millions of ordinary folks. Thick and slippery, crude oil has an evil smell. Yet without it, life as we live it today would be impossible. Oil fuels our engines, heats our homes, and powers the machines that make the everyday things we take for granted, from shopping bags to computers to medical equipment. Nations throughout the last century have gone to war over it. Indeed, oil influences every aspect of modern life. It helps shape the history, society, politics, and economy of every nation on earth. This riveting new book explores what oil is and the role this precious resource has played in America and the world.
Download or read book Crude Reality written by Brian C. Black and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-09-30 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This concise, accessible introduction to the history of oil tells the story of how petroleum has shaped human life since it was first discovered oozing inconspicuously from the soil. For a century, human dependence on petroleum caused little discomfort as we enjoyed the heyday of cheap crude—a glorious episode of energy gluttony that was destined to end. Today, we see the disastrous results in environmental degradation, political instability, and world economic disparity in the waning years of a petroleum-powered civilization—lessons rooted in the finite nature of oil. Considering the nature of oil itself as well as humans’ remarkable relationship with it, Brian C. Black spotlights our modern conundrum and then explores the challenges of our future without oil. It is this essential context, he argues, that will prepare us for our energy transition. Bringing his global perspective and wide-ranging technical knowledge, Black has written an essential contribution to environmental history and the rapidly emerging field of energy history in this sweeping, forward-looking survey.
Download or read book The Story of Oil written by Walter Sheldon Tower and published by . This book was released on 1909 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Oil God and Gold written by Anthony Cave Brown and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 438 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Played out against a background of war and the turmoil of an ancient culture thrust abruptly into the twentieth century, the struggle to control the flow of Saudi oil was won by the United States, which emerged as the dominant Western power in the Middle East."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book Oil Culture written by Ross Barrett and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2014-10-15 with total page 539 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 150 years since the birth of the petroleum industry oil has saturated our culture, fueling our cars and wars, our economy and policies. But just as thoroughly, culture saturates oil. So what exactly is “oil culture”? This book pursues an answer through petrocapitalism’s history in literature, film, fine art, wartime propaganda, and museum displays. Investigating cultural discourses that have taken shape around oil, these essays compose the first sustained attempt to understand how petroleum has suffused the Western imagination. The contributors to this volume examine the oil culture nexus, beginning with the whale oil culture it replaced and analyzing literature and films such as Giant, Sundown, Bernardo Bertolucci’s La Via del Petrolio, and Ben Okri’s “What the Tapster Saw”; corporate art, museum installations, and contemporary photography; and in apocalyptic visions of environmental disaster and science fiction. By considering oil as both a natural resource and a trope, the authors show how oil’s dominance is part of culture rather than an economic or physical necessity. Oil Culture sees beyond oil capitalism to alternative modes of energy production and consumption. Contributors: Georgiana Banita, U of Bamberg; Frederick Buell, Queens College; Gerry Canavan, Marquette U; Melanie Doherty, Wesleyan College; Sarah Frohardt-Lane, Ripon College, Matthew T. Huber, Syracuse U; Dolly Jørgensen, Umeå U; Stephanie LeMenager, U of Oregon; Hanna Musiol, Northeastern U; Chad H. Parker, U of Louisiana at Lafayette; Ruth Salvaggio, U of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Heidi Scott, Florida International U; Imre Szeman, U of Alberta; Michael Watts, U of California, Berkeley; Jennifer Wenzel, Columbia University; Sheena Wilson, U of Alberta; Rochelle Raineri Zuck, U of Minnesota Duluth; Catherine Zuromskis, U of New Mexico.
Download or read book Oil Palm written by Jonathan E. Robins and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2021-05-21 with total page 431 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Oil palms are ubiquitous—grown in nearly every tropical country, they supply the world with more edible fat than any other plant and play a role in scores of packaged products, from lipstick and soap to margarine and cookies. And as Jonathan E. Robins shows, sweeping social transformations carried the plant around the planet. First brought to the global stage in the holds of slave ships, palm oil became a quintessential commodity in the Industrial Revolution. Imperialists hungry for cheap fat subjugated Africa's oil palm landscapes and the people who worked them. In the twentieth century, the World Bank promulgated oil palm agriculture as a panacea to rural development in Southeast Asia and across the tropics. As plantation companies tore into rainforests, evicting farmers in the name of progress, the oil palm continued its rise to dominance, sparking new controversies over trade, land and labor rights, human health, and the environment. By telling the story of the oil palm across multiple centuries and continents, Robins demonstrates how the fruits of an African palm tree became a key commodity in the story of global capitalism, beginning in the eras of slavery and imperialism, persisting through decolonization, and stretching to the present day.
Download or read book Finding Oil written by Brian Frehner and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2011-10-01 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Oil has made fortunes, caused wars, and shaped nations. Accordingly, no one questions the idea that the quest for oil is a quest for power. The question we should ask, Finding Oil suggests, is what kind of power prospectors have wanted. This book revises oil?s early history by exploring the incredibly varied stories of the men who pitted themselves against nature to unleash the power of oil. Brian Frehner shows how, despite the towering presence of a figure like John D. Rockefeller as a quintessential ?oil man,? prospectors were a diverse lot who saw themselves, their interests, and their relationships with nature in profoundly different ways. He traces their various pursuits of power from 1859 to 1920 as a struggle for cultural, intellectual, and professional authority, over both nature and their peers. Here we see how some saw power as the work they did exploring and drilling into landscapes, while others saw it in the intellectual work of explaining how and where oil accumulated. Charting the intersection of human and natural history, their story traces the ever-evolving relationship between science and industry and reveals the unsuspected role geology played in shaping our understanding of the history of oil.
Download or read book Oil and Marble written by Stephanie Storey and published by Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.. This book was released on 2016-03-01 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "From 1501 to 1505, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo Buonarroti both lived and worked in Florence. Leonardo was a charming, handsome fifty year-old at the peak of his career. Michelangelo was a temperamental sculptor in his mid-twenties, desperate to make a name for himself. The two despise each other."--Front jacket flap.
Download or read book The Story of Oil written by Walter Sheldon Tower and published by . This book was released on 1931 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Machineries of Oil written by Katayoun Shafiee and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2023-08-15 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The emergence of the international oil corporation as a political actor in the twentieth century, seen in BP's infrastructure and information arrangements in Iran. In the early twentieth century, international oil corporations emerged as a new kind of political actor. The development of the world oil industry, argues Katayoun Shafiee, was one of the era's largest political projects of techno-economic development. In this book, Shafiee maps the machinery of oil operations in the Anglo-Iranian oil industry between 1901 and 1954, tracking the organizational work involved in moving oil through a variety of technical, legal, scientific, and administrative networks. She shows that, in a series of disagreements, the British-controlled Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC, which later became BP) relied on various forms of information management to transform political disputes into techno-economic calculation, guaranteeing the company complete control over profits, labor, and production regimes. She argues that the building of alliances and connections that constituted Anglo-Iranian oil's infrastructure reconfigured local politics of oil regions and examines how these arrangements in turn shaped the emergence of both nation-state and transnational oil corporation. Drawing on her extensive archival and field research in Iran, Shafiee investigates the surprising ways in which nature, technology, and politics came together in battles over mineral rights; standardizing petroleum expertise; formulas for calculating profits, production rates, and labor; the “Persianization” of employees; nationalism and oil nationalization; and the long-distance machinery of an international corporation. Her account shows that the politics of oil cannot be understood in isolation from its technical dimensions. The open access edition of this book was made possible by generous funding from Knowledge Unlatched.
Download or read book The Oil Curse written by Michael L. Ross and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2013-09-08 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Countries that are rich in petroleum have less democracy, less economic stability, and more frequent civil wars than countries without oil. What explains this oil curse? And can it be fixed? In this groundbreaking analysis, Michael L. Ross looks at how developing nations are shaped by their mineral wealth--and how they can turn oil from a curse into a blessing. Ross traces the oil curse to the upheaval of the 1970s, when oil prices soared and governments across the developing world seized control of their countries' oil industries. Before nationalization, the oil-rich countries looked much like the rest of the world; today, they are 50 percent more likely to be ruled by autocrats--and twice as likely to descend into civil war--than countries without oil. The Oil Curse shows why oil wealth typically creates less economic growth than it should; why it produces jobs for men but not women; and why it creates more problems in poor states than in rich ones. It also warns that the global thirst for petroleum is causing companies to drill in increasingly poor nations, which could further spread the oil curse. This landmark book explains why good geology often leads to bad governance, and how this can be changed.
Download or read book Oil Man written by Michael Wallis and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2014-10-14 with total page 529 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This rich, rousing gusher of a biography captures the life and times of an American hero and the birth of the modern oil empire he created. Frank Phillips, founder of Phillips Petroleum, was one of the most prominent self-made business tycoons of the twentieth century. In Oil Man, Michael Wallis, a best-selling historian of the West, presents Phillips against a pageant of luminaries and outlaws that includes Will Rogers, Harry Truman, Edna Ferber, J. Paul Getty, and Pretty Boy Floyd. Spanning the final days of America's frontier West through the Roaring Twenties and two world wars, Oil Man is a bold, colorful biography of an original American entrepreneur. A classic work that continues to gather accolades since its original publication in 1988, the book captures the life and times of an American hero.
Download or read book Bloodland written by Dennis McAuliffe and published by Council Oak Books. This book was released on 1999 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Murder mystery, family memoir and spiritual journey combined, this story unearths family secrets and ultimately exposes a systematic murder plot.
Download or read book The story of oil written by Walter Sheldon Tower and published by . This book was released on 1914 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
