Thursday, March 20, 2008

What is Robert Bryce reading?

The latest featured contributor to Writers Read: Robert Bryce, author of Gusher of Lies: The Dangerous Delusions of “Energy Independence.”

One paragraph from his entry:
Books that I’ve just begun include Rashid Khalidi’s Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America’s Perilous Path in the Middle East, and Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky. Khalidi’s book is important because it’s really about oil politics. I bought Kurlansky’s book because salt is the mineral commodity which, for millennia, was the modern-day equivalent of oil. America’s laws governing mineral rights were shaped, in large part, by laws governing salt deposits. [read on]
Robert Bryce has written for dozens of publications including Atlantic Monthly, Slate, New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian, The Nation and The American Conservative.

In a recent review of Gusher of Lies, William Grimes of the New York Times calls Bryce “hard-nosed” and “an equal-opportunity smiter” of energy myths. Grimes goes on to say that Bryce “reveals himself in the end as something of a visionary and perhaps even a revolutionary.”

Bryce's first book, Pipe Dreams: Greed, Ego, and the Death of Enron, was named one of the best non-fiction books of 2002 by Publishers Weekly. His second book, Cronies: Oil, the Bushes, and the Rise of Texas, America's Superstate, was published 2004. Bryce spent 12 years writing for the Austin Chronicle and now works as the managing editor of Energy Tribune, a Houston-based newsletter.

Writers Read: Robert Bryce.

--Marshal Zeringue