There are a whole host of theories on how the story of oil will end: Our grandchildren hacking up their own lungs on the tropical shores of Alaska; good Christian soldiers emptying the Holy Land of its worldly black gold just in time for the Rapture; President Susan Sarandon and First Lady Tim Robbins driving up to the White House on inauguration day in a limo run on mango-rind fumes. But few of us – especially we who as precocious teenagers associated progressive politics with our English and History teachers, and stopped paying any attention in Science – know the full story of how oil came to be, and how it came to affect nearly every aspect of our modern economic world.

Sonia Shah’s Crude: The Story of Oil tells a vital, four billion year story in a gripping, sometimes exquisite prose that takes us from plankton to George Bush in two-hundred pages (to paraphrase the late Johnny Carson, ‘Sort of knocks the Hell out of Darwin’s theory…’). Over the course of ten hauntingly-titled chapters (“Exile from Tethys,” “Rockefeller’s Ghost,” “Carbon Perils,” et cetera) Shah outlines the geological, economic and political forces which thrust oil down below the earth’s surface and back up again into our crops, SUVs, military machines, and political conflicts.

With an attention to detail that is surprising for what may be the most ambitious non-Stephen-Hawking-penned attempt to put hundreds of millions of years worth of complex discussion into a short and accessible book, Shah sketches the ways in which we have come to live in a world wherein a single, highly-coveted substance is relied upon to

…make cars run, planes fly, houses warm and lit, hospitals sterile, and supermarkets stocked with fruit and vegetables. Strapped into steely, oil-fed motors, soft, breakable human bodies gloriously extend their reach and power. Newborn babies slide from their mothers into gloved hands, are swaddled in petropolyester blankets, and are hurried off to be warmed by oil-burning heaters. The few metal and wood products that remain today are extracted by oil-powered machines traveling on oil-covered roads. They arrive packaged in oil-made plastics [page viii].

Outlining oil’s “eclipse” of coal, “following the arc of oil-rich America’s eclipse of coal rich Britain [page 15],” Shah contextualizes the such disparate modern phenomena as Jack Kerouac’s On the Road to the now-ubiquitous Sports Utility Vehicle in an oily modern marketplace marked by the dangerous contradiction between an industry’s ability to produce seemingly infinite profits from a dwindling, finite resource.

Not surprisingly, Shah’s book is not a cheery one; with the prospects of continuing imperial conflicts and climate change looming large. Still, it is unfortunate that more time isn’t spent exploring the major popular challenge to the way the business of oil is conducted in the world today: the Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela. In that Latin American OPEC country – which has successfully resisted U.S.-backed attempted coups and crooked referenda processes in recent years – a populist leader with a clear mandate is taking on the oil giants and using the S-word (socialism) in doing so. Shah is clearly drawn to more grassroots challenges than the Venezuelan government’s statist initiatives, such as those launched by the hundreds of Nigerian women who “hijacked a boat and occupied Chevron’s Escravos facility,” turning the “old slave port” into a site of protest in the summer of 2002 (page 100).

But this problem – the reluctance to identify progressive governments as allies of, rather than alternatives to, grassroots action – is a far-broader problem on the left, and is not, in the end, a significant stumbling block in Shah’s analysis.

Crude is necessary and engrossing reading, a vital handbook for understanding the pressing call for change in the way we look after our needs in a globalized and fragile world.

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