From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Please discuss this issue on the talk page or replace this tag with a more specific message. This article has been tagged since November 2006.

The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power (1991; ISBN 0-671-50248-4) is Daniel Yergin's 800-page history of the global oil industry from the 1850s through 1990. The Prize benefited from extraordinary timing: published in October 1990, two months after the invasion of Kuwait ordered by Saddam Hussein and three months before the U.S.-led coalition unleashed the Gulf War to oust Iraqi troops from that country, the book's theme of the historical centrality of what its subtitle calls "the epic quest for oil, money, and power" was in tune with the zeitgeist; the book became a number-one bestseller in the United States and won a Pulitzer Prize. The Prize has been called the "definitive" history of the oil industry, even a "bible" (Matthew Yeomans, Oil: Anatomy of an Industry [New York & London: New Press, 2004], ISBN 1-56584-885-3, p. 220); some critics, though, consider the book too sympathetic to the perspective of the oil industry, of which the author is, in a way, a part.

Now out of print in hardcover, The Prize was published in a paperback edition in December 1992 (according to Barnes and Noble) or January 1993 (according to Amazon.com) (ISBN 0-671-79932-0) that remains in print. The Prize is often cited as essential background reading for students of the history of petroleum. Prof. Joseph R. Rudolph Jr. said in Library Journal, for example, that The Prize, "written by one of the foremost U.S. authorities on energy, . . . is a major work in the field, replete with enough insight to satisfy the scholar and sufficient concern with the drama and colorful personalities in the history of oil to capture the interest of the general public. Though lengthy, the book never drags in developing its themes: the relationship of oil to the rise of modern capitalism; the intertwining relations between oil, politics, and international power; and the relationship between oil and society in what Yergin calls today's age of 'Hydrocarbon Man'."

In 1992 The Prize won a Pulitzer Prize in the category "General Non-Fiction." It has been translated into thirteen languages. The Prize was the basis for a six hour documentary television series titled "The Prize - The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, & Power", narrated by Donald Sutherland. The series is frequently used as a source material in Middle Eastern studies classes and is said to have been seen by 20 million people in the United States.

Seven years in the making, The Prize draws on extensive research carried out by the author and his staff, including Sue Lena Thompsen, Robert Laubacher, and Geoffrey Lumsden. Daniel Yergin has excellent connections with the oil industry, and is the president of Cambridge Energy Research Associates (a private consulting firm providing analysis of oil and other energy markets as well as strategic planning), Global Energy Analyst for NBC and CNBC, member of the board of the United States Energy Association and of the U.S.-Russian Business Council. Yergin's history has 61 pages of notes and a bibliography of 26 pages that lists as sources not only 700 books, articles, and dissertations, 60 government documents, 28 "data sources," more than 34 manuscript collections, fifteen government archives, eight oral histories, and four oil company archives (Amoco, Chevron, Gulf, and Royal Dutch Shell), but also 80 personal interviews with key individuals like James Schlesinger and Armand Hammer. These interviews are often the source of striking anecdotes and make the volume what may be considered in some ways as an "inside" history of the oil industry.