The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power

Why it’s on the list: Yergin’s Pulitzer-winning history of the oil industry from Drake’s well to the Gulf War — the standard single-volume answer to how petroleum organised the twentieth century.

Where I saw it: In the reply thread to @WillManidis’s question, “what is the single best book you can read that will explain an entire industry?” (June 2, 2025) — a crowd-sourced list Kyle recovered by hand and saved to his Apple Note “Books To Read”; the full set of replies lives on what is the single best book… (tweet). It was listed there as “The Prize”.

Connections

• Oil & Gas — The industry the book explains.
• Energy — Where the argument lands.
• Geopolitics — Yergin’s through-line: oil as the organising fact of twentieth-century statecraft.
• what is the single best book… (tweet) — the thread this recommendation came from.