The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power is Daniel Yergin's history of the global petroleum industry from the 1850s through 1990. The Prize became a bestseller, helped by its release date in December 1990, four months after the invasion of Kuwait ordered by Saddam Hussein and one month before the U.S.-led coalition began the Gulf War to oust Iraqi troops from that country. The book eventually went on to win a Pulitzer Prize.

Deep within the earth's crust there exists a second biosphere, composed of very primitive heat-loving bacteria and containing perhaps more living matter than is present on the earth's entire surface. That is the astounding premise of this new book by Thomas Gold, one of the twentieth century's most distinguished scientists and a man with a long history of proposing seemingly preposterous theories that later prove correct. Gold joins the deep hot biosphere argument to another, perhaps even more controversial theory for which he has marshalled evidence: that so-called fossil fuels originate not from compressed biological matter at all but from deep within the earth, present there since the planet's formation, long before our oxygen-rich surface biosphere came into existence.

In this book, the author reflects major stages in the principal history of oil from the beginning of World War II to 1981. He focuses on the significance of critical aspects of petroleum logistics and presents the strategic dimensions of oil.