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Synopsis

Oil is the substance that allows our world to work. Over the course of a century it has taken on such a variety of functions that even a small decrease in oil output would cause economic chaos and nightmarish shortages. We know, of course, that this reliance is a disaster but what we are perhaps less clear about is the terrible damage done by oil to those countries that produce it: the people who on the face of it should most benefit from money gushing from their land.

Crude World is a passionate, gripping, angry tour of some of the most awful places in the world - the violent, polluted, dictatorial regions from which the oil is extracted. Peter Maass follows the journey of oil and shows how it is a substance that sullies everything it touches, poisoning land and rivers, promoting political violence and creating corruption on a staggering scale. Oil is a strangely invisible substance - from oil well to tanker to refinery to petrol station to car almost nobody sees it. It requires very few people to get it out of the ground, which means that it provides very little local employment. What it does generate most concretely is immense profits for the oil companies and for the governments who receive the royalty cheques - governments who will often do more or less anything to keep the flow of effortless money coming.

Peter Maass has talked to everyone from Nigerian fishermen to Moscow oligarchs, from American generals in Iraq to environmentalists in Ecuador in an attempt to understand what makes the human relationship with oil so deadly. Crude World is a remarkable piece of reporting, laying bare the price we pay for the lives we lead.

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