Rating: 
Summary: At last! Clear thinking and writing about a murky industry
Review: With a one-two punch of factual data and anecdotal stories, Economides and Oligney peel open the somewhat dark and mysterious ways of petroleum in modern culture and commerce. It was particularly fascinating (and somewhat gratifying) to read how the oil industry's own political self-dealing for the first half of the twentieth-century (always with the more-than-willing assistance of supposedly populist politicians) nearly led to its own demise in the 1970s and 80s... And, the impact of those lessons in the so far relatively laissez faire 90s and 00s and into the next century.I am somewhat baffled by the assertions of reviewer Stephen Mark, especially about the book's "extremely political" and "ungrammatical" nature. If anything, The Color of Oil exposes the foibles of politics and is an appeal to reason, which of course, is essentially (in the truest sense) apolitical. I found the book well-written and entertaining. Check out the anecdote about Stalin's admonition to his oil minister during WWII: "if Hitler gets one drop of oil, we will shoot you..." I won't give the rest away... If you're the least bit interested in the oil industry, you are in for a real treat...
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