Lara Pawson writes:

An ill-founded optimism informs John Ghazvinian’s Untapped: The Scramble for Africa’s Oil. ‘Between the “scramble for African oil” and the “paradox of plenty”, there is bound to be a happy medium,’ he concludes. ‘And between the red roasting sun that cracks up its soil and the Devil’s excrement that bubbles up from below, there might just be – if we learn to look for it – a god for us all.’ But by Ghazvinian’s own admission, people in the US ‘go through oil like it’s water’, approaching their personal comfort as they’d approach an ‘extreme sport’. They don’t care where oil comes from so long as they get it: the US consumes more than 20 million barrels a day (China is the world’s second highest consumer at 7.3 million).

(LRB 7 February 2008)

Harcourt | hardback 320 pp. |ISBN: 9780151011384