Books like Oil on the Brain by Lisa Margonelli

A comprehensive nonfiction narrative tracing the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, al‑Qaida, and U.S. intelligence failures leading to the 9/11 attacks.

Inside the Green Zone, an exclusive view of life during the U.S. occupation of Iraq reveals the intersection of power, policy, and daily reality amid postwar reconstruction and political corruption.

Bryan Burrough traces the meteoric rise and fall of Texas’s oil magnates—Roy Cullen, H. L. Hunt, Clint Murchison, and Sid Richardson—showing how their fortunes reshaped American politics, culture, and the nation’s economy.

Roy Blount Jr. delivers a witty, introspective collection of essays that trace his Southern roots and Northern influences, examining American identity through humor, culture, and personal anecdotes.

Robert Bryce argues that America’s pursuit of energy independence is a political fabrication, revealing that fossil fuels remain essential, renewables are inadequate, and the ethanol industry has long defrauded taxpayers.

Drawing from hundreds of interviews with colleagues, friends and with unique access to campaign records, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author Carl Bernstein offers a complex and nuanced portrait of one of the most controversial figures of our time: Hillary Clinton. He has given us a book that enables us, at last, to address the questions Americans are insistently--even obsessively--asking: What is her character? What is her political philosophy? Who is she? What can we expect from her?From the Trade Paperback edition.

An award‑winning New York Times journalist chronicles the chilling 2006 murder of ex‑KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko, exposing a rare radioactive assassination and its sharp‑edged implications for Russian politics and international security.

Oil is the substance that allows our world to work. Over the course of a century it has taken on such a variety of functions that even a small decrease in oil output would cause economic chaos and nightmarish shortages. We know, of course, that this reliance is a disaster but what we are perhaps less clear about is the terrible damage done by oil to those countries that produce it: the people who on the face of it should most benefit from money gushing from their land.Crude World is a passionate, gripping, angry tour of some of the most awful places in the world – the violent, polluted, dictatorial regions from which the oil is extracted. Peter Maass follows the journey of oil and shows how it is a substance that sullies everything it touches, poisoning land and rivers, promoting political violence and creating corruption on a staggering scale. Oil is a strangely invisible substance – from oil well to tanker to refinery to petrol station to car almost nobody sees it. It requires very few people to get it out of the ground, which means that it provides very little local employment. What it does generate most concretely is immense profits for the oil companies and for the governments who receive the royalty cheques – governments who will often do more or less anything to keep the flow of effortless money coming.Peter Maass has talked to everyone from Nigerian fishermen to Moscow oligarchs, from American generals in Iraq to environmentalists in Ecuador in an attempt to understand what makes the human relationship with oil so deadly. Crude World is a remarkable piece of reporting, laying bare the price we pay for the lives we lead.

Patrick Radden Keefe’s nonfiction chronicle traces the rise of Sister Ping, a Chinese grandmother who built a global smuggling empire that pulled thousands of Chinese immigrants into the United States during the 1980s.

Into the Mirror recounts the shocking career of FBI Special Agent Robert P. Hanssen, the spy whose betrayals created the most significant breach in U.S. security history.

Entrepreneur Andrew Keen warns of what he sees as a narcissistic and cancerous culture developing with the invent of Web 2.0, whereby professionals are put out of business and the value of the media that we consume drops immensely.

Updating the work of renowned biblical scholar John F. Walvoord, who famously predicted current world events, Armageddon, Oil, and Terror offers shocking predictions on the future of terrorism, oil-based economics, and nuclear war in the Middle East. In all, Armageddon, Oil, and Terror sheds light on 12 events related to end-time prophecies that seem eerily close to coming true. Includes materials from lectures and discussions after 9/11 and incorporates vital, updated material from other Walvoord classics. It is as current as today’s news . . . and every prediction rings true.