Peter Maass

Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil

  • Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil

  • Oil makes the world work, but it destroys many of those who produce it.

    Crude World offers a passionate look at the countries where oil is extracted, and follows the journey of oil, showing how it poisons the land and rivers, promotes political bloodshed, creates corruption on a staggering scale, and rarely offers the people either wealth or freedom. Instead, oil benefits only the companies and governments that will do anything to sustain the flow of money.

    From Nigerian fishermen to Moscow oligarchs, from American generals in Iraq to environmentalists in Ecuador, from British executives to Saudi jihadists, Peter Maass illustrates exactly how our passion for oil is so deadly.

Peter Maass is author of Love Thy Neighbour: A Story of War, based on his experiences covering the war in Bosnia. It won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Overseas Press Club Book Prize, and was a finalist for several other literary awards. He is now a contributing writer at the New York Times Magazine and has written for the New Yorker, the New Republic, the Atlantic Monthly and Slate, among others.

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