About this item
A stunning and revealing examination of oil's indelible impact on the countries that produce it and the people who possess it.Every unhappy oil-producing nation is unhappy in its own way, but all are touched by the "resource curse" - the power of oil to exacerbate existing problems and create new ones. In Crude World, Peter Maass presents a vivid portrait of the troubled world oil has created. He takes us to Saudi Arabia, where officials deflect inquiries about the amount of petroleum remaining in the country's largest reservoir; to Equatorial Guinea, where two tennis courts grace an oil-rich dictator's estate but bandages and aspirin are a hospital's only supplies; and to Venezuela, where Hugo Chvez's campaign to redistribute oil wealth creates new economic and political crises.
About the Author
I was born in 1960 and raised in Los Angeles. In 1983, after graduating from the University of California at Berkeley, I went to Brussels as a copy editor for The Wall Street Journal/Europe. I left the Journal in 1985 to write for The New York Times and The International Herald Tribune, covering NATO and the European Union. In 1987 I moved to Seoul, South Korea, where I wrote primarily for The Washington Post. After three years in Asia I moved to Budapest, Hungary, to cover Eastern Europe and the Balkans. I spent most of 1992 and 1993 covering the war in Bosnia for the Post.In 1994, I took a sabbatical and wrote Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War, which was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1996. The book, which chronicled my experiences covering the Bosnian conflict, won The Los Angeles Times Book Prize (for nonfiction) and the Overseas Press Club Book Prize, and was a finalist for several other literary awards. In 1997, after working for a year in Washington as a staff writer for the Post, I left the paper and moved to New York City, where I have written for The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, New York and Slate, among others. My newest book is Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil, published by Knopf.
