Every unhappy oil-producing nation is unhappy in its own way, but all are touched by oil’s power to worsen existing problems and create new ones. Crude World explores the troubled world oil has created—from Saudi Arabia to Iraq, Russia, Nigeria, Venezuela and beyond. The book features warlords in the oil-rich Niger Delta, petro-billionaires in Moscow, Americans in Baghdad, the gesticulations as well as the politics of Hugo Chavez, and officials in Riyadh who avoid uncomfortable questions about Saudi reserves. A journey into the violent twilight of oil, Crude World answers the questions of what we do for oil and what oil does to us.

A war correspondent’s montage of images—eerie, grotesque, ironic, angry, absurd. A Serb and Muslim, friends before the war, exchanging gossip via shortwave radio hours before they try to kill each other. The Serbian president coolly denying reports of atrocities witnessed by hundreds. A battlefield doctor performing miracles of surgery without anesthetic. In Sarajevo, drivers without headlights gambling their lives in the darkness of no-man’s-land as children scamper across Sniper Alley. Love Thy Neighbor won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for nonfiction and the Overseas Press Club Book Prize.