The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power,   ISBN:9781439110126

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History's back story (and often its lead story) is well crafted and documented as Yergin takes the readers from the oilfields of Titusville up until the first Gulf War (in the version I read). It is very long but well worth the effort.

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Incredible book could not put it down, so many facets in the giant puzzle that has made the world as it is today, it opened my eyes to the great geo political game and it's so relevant to what is happening presently / Present link between Oil-Economy-Military (the non oil energy crisis).

From an Avid war history reader and earlier Special Forces UDT EOD solder.

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This book is an impressive work on how the petroleum industry was turned into the most important industry of the world.
A excellent job, well wrote and nice stories about our recent history.

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All the schollars would must to read this book to understand the world, and what movies it.

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"The Prize" deserved its Pulitzer Prize three times over. It gives insight into history, without which, you can not understand history since the discovery of oil. This book gives history substance and excitement. In between the lines you can see the many small changes in the history of oil, each typically the work of a single person, that totally changed the history of WWII and the world as we know it. For example,Yergin shows that the history of WWII was very much determined by the availability of oil over and over again. The destruction of the Japanese in the south Pacific because their ships could not use proper tactics or go full speed for lack of oil is one example. The story of the "Henderson", a little destroyer, that was able to cripple the Japanese fleet by making it go into a defensive action that caused it to use more oil than it could afford and at the same time wipe out a cruiser was awe inspiring. The story of how the Japanese air force was largely destroyed by poor quality and inadequate fuel for training and flying was shocking. The book was long but fantastically interesting. I could hardly put it down. This is a book to be read slowly and pondered to allow the awesome magnitude of what is being said to sink in.