The Prize review by Josh

In its 800 pages The Prize begins to get a bit repetitive. This isn't strictly Yergin's fault - the history of the oil industry is itself repetitive. Still, from a reader's perspective it's not particularly edifying to spend ten pages on yet another story of gritty oil men who defied standard wisdom to drill in a place nobody thought had oil and then struck - you guessed it - oil!

It was amusing to read the utterly deadpan, confident claims of academics from 1860 onward insisting that places like Kuwait, Texas, and Saudi Arabia definitely did not have any oil, and the world would run out within twenty-years.