The pitch seems to be that oil explains a lot about modern politics. That's not really what's delivered. Instead, we get a collection of well-researched and well-reported little stories about oil which don't quite fit together into an explanatory narrative. This is no Dictator's Handbook: it doesn't give you a useful framework for understanding things. Maddow seems to have edited this book to emphasize how outrageous each individual fact is — and they really are, reported in Maddow's signature style. I think that this focus on the things the reader should find unacceptable comes at the cost of creating a tight-knit coherent explanation. It ends up being a bit Pepe Silvia. Perhaps oil does explain a lot about geopolitics, but this book doesn't put the pieces together to usefully convey that underlying truth.