Oil On the Brain
Remember that book Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy? It's sort of the VH1 Behind the Music of a T-Shirt. I love these kinds of stories. It's the kind of story that takes something as mundane a t-shirt and digs up every fascinating connection to how it was made, the people involved, and the history of its travels around the world. The fact that one t-shirt (in various forms) could pass through the hands of people in Africa, Southeast Asia, and Texas is truly remarkable. Todd calls these stories "Industry Stories" because they let you peer into every last little function of a particular industry. For those of you who are as fascinated as Jack and I are with "industry stories," you'll be thrilled to know that another GREAT one has passed the publishing litmus test (a stupid way of saying it is now in bookstores). This time, instead of a t-shirt, the topic is one that inspires more visceral reactions from we the people - Oil. After becoming fascinated with oil's grasp on American society, journalist Lisa Margonelli decided to embark on a quest to unearth just how and why gas ends up in our tanks. Like I said, I love these stories, and Oil On the Brain ranks at the top of any "industry story" best-of list.
I'm willing to bet that the last time gas prices went up (probably about, oh, I don't know, 13 seconds ago) you didn't think to yourself, "That darn Nigerian Warlord, he must have made another cell phone call and single-handedly changed the world price of oil." No kidding! This was one story Margonelli encountered. And again, it's stories like this that make me love these books.
What an experience this author must have had. It all starts with a conversation with Michael Gharib, owner of Twin Peaks Petroleum, an independently owned gas station in San Francisco. But from there, the places Lisa travels, and the people she meets, are out of this world (actually, they are in this world. It's not like she traveled to Neptune). She hangs with a tanker truck driver; she meets some lonely workers on a Texas drilling rig; she jets of to Chad (oh the unfulfilled promise of oil) to spend time with villagers; she manages to weasel her way into the Strategic Petroleum Reserve; she tours refineries that she likes to call the "molecular butchery'"; she rubs elbows with Shanghai bureaucrats eager to spawn a "new Detroit"; she goes deep inside the New York Mercantile Exchange's crude oil market; and she spends time on the oil fields in Venezuela and Iran. Wow! Let me say that again - WOW!
And through all her travels, this fine author manages to insert humor into seeming unlikely places. I find it hilarious that she openly expresses her "love of hydrocarbons." Why does she love hydrocarbons? It's not because they are useful even if destructive. It's is because their formation is EXTREMELY unlikely to occur and we humans used some serious ingenuity to extricate them.
This is a great story, a great book, written by an extremely good writer. As Jack says, "So, here is the way I see it. There are five spots on the FT/Goldman Sachs 2007 [Business Book of the Year] List. The question now is what the other four will be."
20 Available Copies
P.S. I'm curious which industry you'd like to see written about in this way. I'd like to see someone examine guitars -So many kinds made in so many different places.
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