The Wall Street Journal runs a weekly column in which an author lists the five best books on a particular subject. The Journal invited me to write the column this week. My five best books on oil are (drum roll…) Ida Tarbell’s The History of the Standard Oil Company, Anthony Sampson’s The Seven Sisters, Paul Collier’s The Bottom Billion, Abdeldrahman Munif’s Cities of Salt, and Ken Saro-Wiwa’s A Month and a Day. The story is posted on the Journal’s site and on mine.
Author: Peter Maass
I was born and raised in Los Angeles. In 1983, after graduating from the University of California at Berkeley, I went to Brussels as a copy editor for The Wall Street Journal/Europe. I left the Journal in 1985 to write for The New York Times and The International Herald Tribune, covering NATO and the European Union. In 1987 I moved to Seoul, South Korea, where I wrote primarily for The Washington Post. After three years in Asia I moved to Budapest to cover Eastern Europe and the Balkans. I spent most of 1992 and 1993 covering the war in Bosnia for the Post.
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