The End of Oil: On the Edge of a Perilous New World

By Paul Roberts. Houghton Mifflin, 400 pages, $26.

The key word in the title of The End of Oil: On the Edge of a Perilous New World is "perilous"; this book made me want to run away to a cabin in the woods and hunker down with a few hundred cans of pork 'n' beans and a seed catalog, waiting in fear for the hour when brother will kill brother for a gallon of petrol. Not that Paul Roberts is particularly apocalyptic – he's more like a rather grim schoolteacher who suspects we're all slumped over our desks and drooling on our notebooks but who soldiers on at the chalkboard anyhow. He explains how oil is created, gives a nicely succinct history of the industrial revolution, and then describes the financial and political behemoths that have sunk their (and our) livelihoods into oil, oil, and more oil. In regard to the feeling of inescapable doom that settles over the reader upon the discovery of just how much the United States is beholden to and inextricable from the oil industry, we're the voting citizens of the country that's (a) doing a vast share of the environmental damage, and, fortunately, (b) has the greatest capacity to foster worldwide environmental policy change. People from other countries can only read this book with thinly disguised horror, but we're actually in a position to do something. (Heather Smith)