The Prize

Daniel Yergin

Hardly a day goes by in which oil--whether in terms of its price, its impact on the economy, its role in international relations and in the environment--is not in a major newspaper story or in the television news or a hot topic on the blogs.

For me, the story of oil is the story of globalization. While I am sure there were other commodities that influenced the international decision-making of the most powerful countries throughout history, reading The Prize impressed on me the fact that the decisions countries have made about oil have been the decisions that bound this world into such a tightly interconnected web of interlocking politics and economies.
Policies around almost every aspect of our daily lives are influenced by the location, control, price, and availability of oil. From the current political boundaries of states the world around to the reason your toothbrush is shaped like it is, oil has had a determining role in our reality.
And now with the globe thoroughly globalized, we find that we have created a system we no longer control. Echoing Churchill, the systems we create will later create us. What we do, from our politicians votes in Washington to our dollar choices at the grocery store, now directly affects others who we will never meet and who's existence if often unknown to us.
Where the Butterfly Effect receives much attention for what it reveals about the complexity and inter-connectivity of the world, we've managed to increase the speed to such an extent that processes that took millions of years now take seconds.
If you would like to learn about oil, read The Prize. You'll find out that you learn about much more than oil.

God Save the Mark

Donald Westlake

I said, What is it?
My book, he said reverently. He patted the nearest stack of papers. This is it.
Your book? A sort of dread overtook me, and I said, You mean, your autobiography?
Oh, no! Not at all, no. I didn't have that sort of career, not me, no. Quiet tour, quiet tour. He gazed down fondly at his stacks of paper. No, this isn't fact at all. But based on fact, naturally, based on fact.
A novel then, I said.
In a way, in a certain way. But the history is accurate. He squinted at me as though to demonstrate how accurate he'd been, and said, To the finest detail. Facts almost impossible to find, all in here, all accurate. Studied the era, got it all down.
Still groping in the dark, I said, It's a historical novel.
In a manner of speaking, he said. Kneeling there beside his suitcase full of paper, he leaned toward me, braced one hand on his manuscript, and whispered, It's a retailing of the campaigns of Julius Caesar, with the addition of aircraft.
I said, I beg your pardon?
I call it, he said, Veni, Vidi, Vici Through Air Power. Pretty good, eh?

What is the heart of an author, the produce of his mind, that he has nursed and sheltered and carried, at the moment he shows it to another can sound so startling hollow and worthless. Books do need a champion, if not their author, than who?

The Secret Sharer

Joseph Conrad

On my right hand there were lines of fishing stakes resembling a mysterious system of half-submerged bamboo fences, incomprehensible in its division of the domain of tropical fishes, and crazy of aspect as if abandoned for ever by some nomad tribe of fishermen now gone to the other end of the ocean; for there was no sign of human habitation as far as the eye could reach.

God only knows why they locked me in every night. To see some of their faces you'd have thought they were afraid I'd go about at night strangling people. Am I a murdering brute? Do I look it? By Jove!

Just because a man kills another once, doesn't mean he's going to go about killing all his friends.