Notes: Daniel Yergin - The Prize (Part 1)

Some notes I wrote while reading Part 1 of Daniel Yergin’s The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power. If you know Mr. Yergin, please tell I’d love to have him on my podcast. You can reach me at dwarkesh@dwarkeshpatel.com. It’s interesting to me how the best histories on any one topic are often histories of basically everything. Kotkin’s biography of Stalin starts with a digression on Bismarck’s legacy and how the age of colonization changed the way European powers thought about modernization. The Making of the Atomic Bomb has detailed descriptions of the culture of early 20th century European science and the progression of the second World War. Caro’s Lyndon Johnson biographies will teach you about 19th century Texas politics, hill country skirmishes with Indians, the history of the US senate, and much more. In many cases, writing these kinds of books takes years or (in the case of Caro) even decades longer than the authors initially expected. Because they get nerd-sniped and ra

Some notes I wrote while reading Part 1 of Daniel Yergin’s The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power. If you know Mr. Yergin, please tell I’d love to have him on my podcast. You can reach me at dwarkesh@dwarkeshpatel.com. It’s interesting to me how the best histories on any one topic are often histories of basically everything. Kotkin’s biography of Stalin starts with a digression on Bismarck’s legacy and how the age of colonization changed the way European powers thought about modernization. The Making of the Atomic Bomb has detailed descriptions of the culture of early 20th century Eu