Best Petrochemical Engineering

Deemed "the best history of oil ever written" by Business Week and with more than 300,000 copies in print, Daniel Yergin’s Pulitzer Prize–winning account of the global pursuit of oil, money, and power has been extensively updated to address the current energy crisis. Following on from there, The Prize , winner of the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction, is a comprehensive history of one of the commodities that powers the world--oil. Energy consultant Yergin limns oil's central role in most of the wars and many international crises of the 20th century.

-- The Economist Phenomenal reviews and sales greeted the hardcover publication of The Big Rich, New York Times bestselling author Bryan Burrough's spellbinding chronicle of Texas oil. The saga begins heroically in the early 20th-century oil boom, with wildcatters roaming the Texas countryside drilling one dry hole after another, scrounging money and fending off creditors until gushers of black gold redeem them. In this riveting history, Burrough charts the decades-long rush that made Texas oil into a political and economic powerhouse through the lives of the four great barons: Hugh Roy Cullen, Clint Murchison, Sid Richardson, and H. L. Hunt. The fortunes of the Big Four swelled during the Second World War, when the United States was the world�s leading producer of crude, but by the nineteen-eighties Middle Eastern oil was ascendant, and the barons� legacies had �dissolved into a sordid litany of debauchery, family feuds, scandals, and murder.� Burrough brings each of his outsized subjects brilliantly to life, pitching their individual epics against a grand narrative of rise and decline.

The myth of oil scarcity has allowed four giant corporations--ExxonMobil, Shell, BP and Chevron--along with a handful of Wall Street and London banks to control the world's most important energy commodity, oil. Truth is that the world is running into oil, not running out of oil. F. William Engdahl discusses little-known details of wars and manipulations designed over the past half century or more-- wars in Africa, the mis-named Arab Spring, Iraq, Afghanistan, all to maintain a lock-grip control of the world's known oilfields. Were its implications understood widely, oil and gas would be considered as virtually a renewable energy and our energy crises and wars a thing of the past. The converse is also true--If oil cannot be controlled the controlling powers lose their control over other nations and the wars that go with it. F. William Engdahl is is an internationbal best-selling author whose books on geopolitics and economics have been published in twelve languages.

Ranging from the basic principles of Newtonian physics through such formidable theories as general relativity and quantum mechanics, Feynman's lectures stand as a monument of clear exposition and deep insight. The late Richard P. Feynman was Richard Chace Tolman Professor of Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology.

A Perfect Red recounts the colorful history of cochineal, a legendary red dye that was once one of the world's most precious commodities. "Elusive, expensive and invested with powerful symbolism, red cloth became the prize possession of the wealthy and well-born," Greenfield writes in her intricate, fully researched and stylishly written history of Europe's centuries-long clamor for cochineal, a dye capable of producing the "brightest, strongest red the Old World had ever seen." Striving to maintain a trade monopoly, Spain fiercely guarded the secrets of cochineal cultivation in Mexico and only after centuries of speculation (was the red powder derived from plant or animal?). Greenfield recounts the wild, clandestine attempts by adventurer naturalists to cultivate both the cochineal insect and its host plant, nopal, beyond their native Mexico, acts of folly driven by the desire for scientific fame and commercial profit. Native to Mexico, the scale insect cochineal was first harvested as a dyestuff by the ancient Aztecs, and once its properties were discovered by European conquistadors, it became the quarry in an international race to obtain a monopoly on its production.