Hacker News Books

For more on the history of oil, The Prize by Daniel Yergin is an excellent read. While long, it's quite captivating and interesting.

http://www.amazon.com/Prize-Epic-Quest-Money-Power/dp/143911...

Titan is a great read. For a more throughout book of the oil industry there is also Yergin's The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power.

Daniel Yergin's The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power is a pretty good start, there's a TV series. Current to 1990s or so.

The Prize is my second favorite book of history/non-fiction ever. My favorite is "The Power Broker" which has a similar sort of style and scale. Highly recommended.

Indeed, but interestingly enough the book, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power, only has 9 mentions of the word computer and zero for supercomputer.

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

https://www.amazon.com/Prize-Epic-Quest-Money-Power/dp/14391...

Offhand...

1. 'The Making of the Atomic Bomb', R. Rhodes

2. 'Apollo: Race to the Moon', C. Murray, C. Cox

3. 'The Prize', D. Yergin

4. 'Are Your Lights On?', D. Gause, G. Weinberg

5. 'Becoming A Technical Leader', G. Weinberg

For anyone interested in the history of Oil, The Prize by Daniel Yergen is a really interesting book.

The industrial revolution is a vast subject, much of which happened in Britain and the US from the mid-18th to 20th centuries. Yergin's The Prize is a fascinating look at how oil took it into high gear. I highly recommend that book.

This is probably more than you want to read, but The Prize by Daniel Yergin is a stellar history of the oil industry from 1800s-1990s
https://www.amazon.com/Prize-Epic-Quest-Money-Power/dp/14391...

'The Prize' is phenomenal. I took an econ class on the petroleum industry and the prof used it instead of a text book.
PBS turn into into a really good multi-part documentary.

I found 'The Prize', a history of the development of the oil industry, by Daniel Yergin, to be fascinating.

Perhaps closer to your request, 'Kitchen Confidential' by Anthony Bourdain comes the closest to describing life in a restaurant kitchen in a very entertaining way. (Source: Was once a dishwasher and cook in a couple places.) If you like Bourdain, his friend, Michael Ruhlman has several books on being, and becoming, a chef.

Thanks. The Prize by Daniel Yergin isn't bad either.

I second the author's recommendation to read The Prize by Daniel Yergin. Was very illuminating.

Petroleum and Sea Power -- https://aoghs.org/petroleum-in-war/petroleum-and-sea-power/

Before airplanes, before tanks, the oil-fired battleship was a vast improvement over coal-fired battleships.

Also "The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power" by Daniel Yergin is essential for understanding the history of oil.

Interesting article. I was tempted to start boycotting Wal-Mart, but that is the nature of business.

I'm currently reading The Prize and there are many similarities between Wal-Mart and Standard Oil. I wonder if the government will ever break up Wal-Mart.

Is there a limit to how big a company can get?

The Obstacle is the Way (somewhat encouraging)

The Art of Empathy (very interesting)

The Three Body Problem (good)

The Startup Way (decent)

The Politics of Bitcoin (short but interesting)

Why We Sleep (very much worth it)

The Last Arrow (mixed feelings)

The Prize (boring but informative)

Superhuman by Habit (OK, not much new)

The Circle of Profit (straight to the point)

Thinking in Systems (couldn't finish it)

Radical Candor (awesome)

Harry Potter #1 (too low of a reading level)

Man's Search for Meaning (classic)

Flow (Amazing!)

Scary Close (great)

Don't miss sivers's great list: http://sivers.org/book

As for mine,

Science Fiction (I like these authors so I'd recommend most of their books -- listing which ones I think are a good 'starter novel' for them):

  Charles Stross: Halting State
  Vernor Vinge: A Fire Upon The Deep
  Iain M. Banks: Culture novels, start with Player of Games
  David Louis Edelman: Jump 225 Trilogy
  Daniel Suarez: Daemon and Freedom(tm)
  John Scalzi: Old Man's War series
  Dan Simmons: Hyperion

Self-improvement:

  The Talent Code
  Seeking Wisdom: From Darwin to Munger
  Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

Non-fiction:

  Amusing Ourselves To Death (highly recommended)
  The Science of Fear
  The Black Swan
  Tokyo Vice
  Racing The Beam (Atari history, very cool)
  books by Daniel Pink
  Guns, Germs, and Steel
  The Prize by Daniel Yergin

Fantasy:

Anything by Gaiman or China Mieville, pretty much.

EDIT: links to previews (legally) available online

Charles Stross's Accelerando (entire book): http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelera...

David Louis Edelman's Infoquake (1st 7 chapters): http://www.davidlouisedelman.com/jump225/infoquake/

I don't mean to hijack this thread, but I too wasn't interested in history at all until I read this book: The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power ( http://www.amazon.com/Prize-Epic-Quest-Money-Power/dp/143911...) Which was a fascinating history from the rise of oil in modern times uptil the first Gulf War. I would love recommendations on other history books that got people turned onto history?

Cosmos by John North.

This book is just threatening to be a masterpiece. An overview of mans scientific ideas about the stars and the planets and the cosmos in general from before Ptolemy to Einstein and modern times. Absolutely epic in scope. This book is to the history of astronomy like "The Prize" is to the history of oil, only bigger.

The Prize - Daniel Yergin.
Siddhartha - Herman Hesse

The first is a fantastic history of oil. It brings out the politics, economics and personalities that have lit up the history of oil very well. Especially relevant in this day and age, when oil is behind so many geo-political conflicts.

The second is a bit more personal. I could write an entire essay about this book, but suffice it to say that it was exactly the right book at the right time for me. Sometimes, a book just comes along and changes your perspective and way of thinking. This was one of those books for me.

Despite being very much an apologist for and champion of the oil industry, Daniel Yergin's The Prize is outstanding.

Vaclav Smil's Energy and Civilization and books on energy transitions gives a mostly energy-physics and technological bacground on the coal-oil transition (and ag-coal previously). Manfred Weissenbacher's Sources of Power adds in some of the political dimension.

If your only real exposure to history was through primary and secondary school, you really owe it to yourself to explore the space yourself.

It's not just late 20th century history that's elided, I'm finding (despite some exposre) that my knowledge of Greek and Roman history, of the post-Enlightenment era in Europe, much of English history, the late 19th century, 20th century issues of labour, race, drugs, culture, immigration, women's rights, and more, was tremendously elided.

* James Loewen, Lies my Teacher Told Me: Everything your American History textbook got wrong is a good start. http://www.worldcat.org/title/lies-my-teacher-told-me-everyt...

* Howard Zinn's A People's History has its own biases, but they're a strong antidote to the traditional view. http://www.worldcat.org/title/peoples-history-of-the-united-...

* Will and Ariel Durant's Lessons from History is a short (115 pages) overview of major themes from history. It's a wonderful introduction to the Durants' broader works. http://www.worldcat.org/title/lessons-of-history/oclc/336824...

* James Burke's Connections and The Day the Universe Changed are good introductions to histories of technology and philosophy. From these, continuing the PBS series mode, I'd recommend Kenneth Clark's Civilisation and Jacob Bronowski's The Ascent of Man. These are truly excellent productions.

* Daniel Yergin, The Prize, whacked me over the head with just how tremndously momentous the discovery of petroleum in Western Pennsylvia was, and the impacts across the last quarter of the 19th century and all of the 20th. Follow this with a more technical exploration in Vaclav Smil's Energy in World History and Manfred Weissenbacher's Sources of Power.

And that's only the barest start.

Though he's scarcely a Limits to Growth devotee, it was Daniel Yergin's The Prize (book and BBC/PBS series) which hammered home the absolutely staggering impact of petroleum on human growth and technological progress.

https://www.worldcat.org/title/prize-the-epic-quest-for-oil-...

Vaclav Smil's Energy and Civilization tells the history, and impact, of energy on humanprogress evenmore specifically, and over a far longer period, through five eras: hunter-gatherer, ag, coal, oil, and whatever it is that comes next.

https://www.worldcat.org/title/energy-and-civilization-a-his...

EROEI is a large part of that, though it doesn't tell the whole story. EROEI of coal is often higher than petroleum, but petroleum's handling characteristics -- fluid rather than solid -- and inherent portability, over both long distances and short, make it vastly more useful and flexible, most especially in motive applications, and transport in particular.

Some of petroleum's role in mining can be replaced by electricity (see vast open-pit electrically-powered bucket excavators), so long as there's a primary energy source for that. Others not so much: global bulk liquid and ore transport is highly tied to oil-fueled marine deisel engines.

Expanding on my earlier post:

Connections is an excellent series to watch concerning the Industrial Revolution, as is The Day the Universe Changed. Both series cover far more, but typically span in in most parts. Burke is clearly fascinated by the period (he's a bit of a tech geek and fan -- his history with the Apollo program should tip you to that), as well as much of what came before and since. The spanning is actually really useful as you come to a better understanding of why the Industrial Revolution happened where and when it did (though I'd argue, not a complete understanding -- I'm still working at that myself).

The Day the Universe Changed complements and supplements Connections extremely well.

As I noted below, I watched both after having seen The Prize, based on Daniel Yergin's book of the same name, which follows the history of petroleum from 1859 to 1992 (the date of publication). That series was simply fascinating.

If you're interested in the period, I'd also recommend Arnold Toynbee's Lectures on the Industrial Revolution which cover a lot of the economic and social issues of the century following Adam Smith. Robert Ayres is a modern economist who's looked at the role of innovation throughout the period in his paper "Technological Transformations and Long Waves" (1989).

Oil has been an explicit primary strategic concern since the start of the 20th century, if not before. It was a fundamental objective of both world wars, and many other conflicts. It strikes me as quite possible that the relative successes of capitalist and communist blocs had far more to do with resource and oil than ideology.

See Daniel Yergin's The Prize, or Robert Newman's "A Brief History of Oil".

https://www.worldcat.org/title/prize-the-epic-quest-for-oil-...

https://youtu.be/GIpm_8v80hw

Affixing numbers to specific units of fuel is actually pretty much precisely what happened under US Interior Secretary Harold Ickes and the "certificates of clearance" oil production quota system implemented by DOI and the Texas Railroad Commission (it confusingly neither regulated railroads nor was called by the sensible acronym, it's referred to as the TRO). This system was in place from 1933 until 1972, and effectively regulated the global price and supply of oil over that period. Absent some initial hiccups and a slightly market disruption known as World War II, the result was a phenomenally stable price and match of oil to global demand from 1945 - 1973.

Daniel Yergin covers this in detail in chapter 13 of his truly epic history of oil, The Prize (1992).

https://www.worldcat.org/title/prize-the-epic-quest-for-oil-...

Also:

https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/mlc03

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/715f

And a good, concise overview of the history here: http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/01/29/us-usa-crude-stock...

World War I, increased demand, and a period in the 1920s during which there was genuine concern that all the oil that could be found had been.

That fear disappeared with the East Texas oilfield discovery in 1930. Which so increased the supply of oil relative to demand that prices fell to 13 cents per barrel.

This created a number of problems, including the prospect of damaging oilfields to the point that future extraction would be compromised. It ended up with the governors of both Texas and Oklahoma calling out the state militia, and, in Texas's case, the Texas Rangers, and seizing control of wellheads by force of arms in an effort to constrain extraction and drive oil prices up -- to $1/bbl.

This resulted in the Texas Railroad Commission effectively controlling US oil output (with oversight from the US Department of Interior) from 1931 to 1972, at which point, peak US oil meant that there was no longer any surplus extraction capacity to limit. Shortly afterward the Arabs tried another of their periodic embargos against the US and Europe, and, to everyone's shock, it actually worked.

If you look at the price of oil, from 1931 to 1972 it was remarkably stable. Even WWII and the post-war consumption boom barely moved the needle. Post 1974, everything goes all to hell. We're still there now.

Daniel Yergin's masterpiece work, The Prize, covers this history in great depth.

I very strongly recommend reading literature on the Industrial Revolution(s) generally, and on relating energy and economic growth. There's still a fair bit I've yet to read, but:

* Vaclav Smil, Energy in World History (1994). Highly technical, short, dense, but quite readable. Focus is on energy and technology primarily, economics and politics only remotely.

* Manfred Weissenbacher, Sources of Power (2009). Also technical, long, rambles, somewhat, and unevenly edited, but still recommended. Draws heavily on Smil as well as numerous other sources, and includes more politics (particularly recent) and economics.

* Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth (2016). A good technical history, a middling economics text. Really hammers home the transformation in the United States, 1870 - 2015.

* Daniel Yergin, The Prize (1992). A history of oil, which is to say, the last (and largest) segments of Weissenbacher and Smil's histories (Weissenbacher continues to a forecast / scenario), and much of Gordon's work. Focus is on energy.

Gordon's book is part of a series edited by Joel Mokyr on modern industrial history and development, there are several other good books within it.

I've yet to read, but still recommend, Karl Polanyi's Great Transformation.

And yes, the obsession with economic growth was a post-WWII thing. Mostly, people didn't want to see a return of the Great Depression and pre-war crisis.

This is an obscure law still underlying (so to speak) much of resource extracton, in the US and elsewhere, even if moderated somewhat. It played an outsized role especially in the history of oil and gas development (see especially chapter 13 of Daniel Yergin's The Prize, as well as many contemporary accounts of the Pennsylvania, Spindletop, Kern River/Longview, and East Texas oil strikes), and has echoes in present attitudes expressed in surveillance capitasim as practiced by Google, Facebook, Amazon, telcos, financial firms, and other data brokers.

And yet information on it is exceedingly hard to come by.

Quoting TFA on the law's history:

Much of this fussing and fighting comes courtesy of the Rule of Capture, an archaic piece of British common law carried to these shores. The Rule states that whoever owns a piece of property owns the water beneath it. The Texas precedent was set in 1843 in the case of Acton v. Blundell, when Texas was a republic and people were largely ignorant about the nature and movement of groundwater. The Rule of Capture was upheld in 1861, when Frazier v. Brown was decided, and again in 1904 when the Texas Supreme Court heard The Houston & Texas Central Railway Co. v. East case. The court upheld The Rule by reasoning water below the soil was too “mysterious, secret, and occult” to regulate.

Copies of these rulings are hard to come by. Should anyone have access to PDFs, please contact me at dredmorbius <at> protonmail <dot> com.

Wow you reading Yergin's "The Prize", which won the Pulitzer Prize award and think that you know everything about the oil. You is actually an idiot. I can recommed you Jarred Diamond, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse:_How_Societies_Choose_... who also had his, how do you call it, the Pulitzer prize. This proves everything. Keep denying the obvious. This was proven useful.

> You're the one doing "manipulation". You made the bold statement that "ALL"

You is imbicillic criminal, not able to understand the message, after I chewed how ALL is consumed by cars? I have told you not to approach me before you figure out the %% of oil "spent on the fertilizer".

I really, strongly recommend you to read "The Prize", by Daniel Yergin. Won the Pulitzer. If you want to understand the world and how it works, and the REAL reasons for the History to be what it is, this is it. Best book in existence for Diplomacy, global economy and geopolitics. You will be amazed. You will never look at the world the same way again.

Very much this.

The source which really hammered this home for me was Daniel Yergin's book, The Prize. It's a history of oil, but if you think that that doesn't have anything to do with war ....

Yergin never quite comes out and state that WWI and WWII were resource wars, but they were resource wars.

WWI saw the introduction of mechanisation to battle: cavelry were replaced by tanks, first motorcycles, then cars and trucks were used for personnel and materiel transport. And aircraft. Plus rail and ships: Churchill had famously just converted the British Navy from coal to oil, a massive military and operation advantage, but also an incredible risk for Britain who lacked (so far as anyone knew at the time) any indigenous oil. Instead, by way of naval bases serving Suez and India, it happened to have a presence in Persia and on the Arabian peninsula ....

The United States singlehandedly supplied both its homeland, two fronts, and its allies with oil through WWII. Much of the Pacific battle was over Japanese access to Indonesian oilfields (and Chinese coal), which the US blocked by way of submarines. The Germans very nearly accomplished the same for domestic US oil shipments from Texas to East Coast population centres, resulting in a government financed-and-operated oil pipelines project, still in use today, the Big Inch and the Little Inch pipelines, from Beaumont, TX, to New Jersey.

And petroleum-fueled tractors meant that the U.S. could also feed not only itself and its troops but its European allies.

The U.S., Russia, and Saudi Arabia rank 1-3, in that order (I think) for the largest original oil reserves. Venezuala is 3rd, though with much heavier (harder to extract, not as useful, dirtier) petroleum.

The Imperial Navy was so utterly defeated and out of resources that they were sending pilots on kamikaze missions to save fuel. Virtually all training had been suspended in the final months of the war because the Japanese had no access to oil. This is why their initial thrust in the war was south to the oil fields of the Dutch East Indies (the history of the Royal Dutch Shell facilities in the region is an incredible but largely untold story in WWII).

Depriving the Japanese of oil was an early and effective tactic of the American Navy in the Pacific. The Japanese made a faulty assumption that they could defend supply lines from the Southern Zone to the Japan. In many ways, this was the downfall of Japanese naval forces in WWII. The Japanese also didn't realize that the US and Britain had long since cracked their codes, both military and diplomatic, and even when the Germans told the Japanese their codes had been compromised, they refused to believe it!

Quoting from Daniel Yergin's The Prize:

> Of Japan's total wartime steel merchant shipping, some 86 percent was sunk during the conflict and another 9 percent so seriously damaged as to be out of action by the time the war ended.

The Allies were sinking Japanese oil tankers faster than the Japanese could build new ones!

Japanese defeat in WWII can't be assigned to any single cause, but the vastly superior supply chain of the US Navy in the Pacific and the enormous petroleum production capabilities of America is surely up there.

What specific examples of nationally-controlled or regulated oil industries do you have in mind?

As of 1900, the major oil extractors were the United States, Russia, Romania, Austria-Hungary (Bóbrka field), the Dutch East Indies, and Peru. Canada had some operations.

Not on that list: Persia (1908), Venezuela (1914), Mexico (1901), Iraq (1927), Saudi Arabia (1938), Brazil (1930), Kuwait (1938).

Unless you're talking about subsequent development of national oil companies, largely in the 1950s: Saudi Arabia, Brazil, Venezuela, Mexico, etc. See generally Yergin's The Prize.

I'm mostly just a vast store of useless information. Your comment brought up the association with the earlier story. I couldn't tell you the first place I encountered it, probably in some juvenile archive of war / spy stories, it's stuck with me through the years.

As for things to read: I'm generally interested in, well, a lot of things, but crypto, security, organizational and national aspects of both, and the like. Schneier's Cryptography and his more recent works (most of which focus increasingly on human factors), comp.risks, The Art of War, Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, random linkage through Wikipedia (highly underrated). Actually, for that last, I should probably write intentional linkage. Find some topic you're interested in, search for a few base articles, and follow the links out to other related aspects. Particularly case studies / people, and the like.

If you're going to study WWII, I have to recommend Daniel Yergin's The Prize (either the book or the video series, I've viewed the latter and confess only skimmed through bits of the former, it's voluminous). The relationship of oil to the events of the 20th century simply cannot be overstated.

I second that recommendation for Daniel Yergin's pulitzer prize winning book "The Prize". Oil as an energy source changed mankind. In addition to the history of oil in the US, it gave insight into the rising importance of oil during WWII (Hilter diverting his troops to capture the Baku oil field instead of focusing on Stalingrad), the post-war division of the world oil fields between the British and Americans (U.S. took Saudi Arabia (aramco), the Brits took Iran and Kuwait (anglo-persion and kuwait oil).