Crude: The Story of Oil [Hardcover]

Sonia Shah (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 7, 2004

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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"A brilliant book...Shah writes beautifully, with dispassionate, elegant clarity--and it is all the more powerful for it." -- The Guardian, February 26, 2005

"Couldn’t be more relevant." -- USA Today, October 17, 2004

"Particularly eloquent on the despoliation of the Delta region of southern Nigeria. -- The Nation, November 8, 2004

"Shah could have easily written a laundry list...This volume is more than that." -- Clamor magazine

"Surely one of the most important books of the year." -- Dingbat magazine

About the Author

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.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 246 pages
• Publisher: Seven Stories Press (September 7, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1583226257
• ISBN-13: 978-1583226254
• Product Dimensions: 5.9 x 0.8 x 8.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,156,071 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Sonia Shah is a science writer and critically acclaimed author whose writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, The Nation, New Scientist and elsewhere. Her latest book is "The Fever: How Malaria Has Ruled Humankind for 500,000 Years" from Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus & Giroux (July 2010).

Her prize-winning 2006 drug industry exposé, The Body Hunters: Testing New Drugs on the World's Poorest Patients (New Press), has been hailed by Publishers Weekly as "a tautly argued study...a trenchant exposé...meticulously researched and packed with documentary evidence," and as "important [and] powerful" by The New England Journal of Medicine. The book, which international bestselling novelist and The Constant Gardener author John Le Carré called "an act of courage," has enjoyed wide international distribution, including French, Japanese, and Italian editions. The Library Journal named it one of the best consumer health books of 2006.

Her 2004 book, Crude: The Story of Oil (Seven Stories), was acclaimed as "brilliant" and "beautifully written" by The Guardian and "required reading" by The Nation, and has been widely translated, from Japanese, Greek, and Italian to Bahasa Indonesia. Her "raw and powerful" (Amazon.com) 1997 collection, Dragon Ladies: Asian American Feminists Breathe Fire, still in print after 10 years, continues to be required reading at colleges and universities across the country.

Shah's writing, based on original reportage from around the world, from India and South Africa to Panama, Malawi, Cameroon, and Australia, has been featured on current affairs shows around the United States, as well as on the BBC and Australia's Radio National. A frequent keynote speaker at political conferences, Shah has lectured at universities and colleges across the country, including Columbia's Earth Institute, MIT, Harvard, Brown, Georgetown and elsewhere. Her writing on human rights, medicine, and politics have appeared in a range of magazines from Playboy, Salon, and Orion to The Progressive and Knight-Ridder. Her television appearances include A&E and the BBC, and she's consulted on many documentary film projects, from the ABC to Channel 4 in the UK. Shah is a former writing fellow of The Nation Institute and the Puffin Foundation.

Shah was born in 1969 in New York City to Indian immigrants. Growing up, she shuttled between the northeastern United States where her parents practiced medicine and Mumbai and Bangalore, India, where her extended working-class family lived, developing a life-long interest in inequality between and within societies. She holds a BA in journalism, philosophy, and neuroscience from Oberlin College, and lives with molecular ecologist Mark Bulmer and their two sons Zakir and Kush.

Photo by Joyce Ravid.