The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power

This is one of my favorite books to read. This abriged version is a disaster. They cut out all the interesting history of the oil companies and only covered the politics of mid 20th century oil. What happened to the Colonel, Rockefeller, the 7 sisters? This was awful. If you only want the oil politics of 1950 to 1990 then this is fine. For me...yuk!

Silly me - I didn't see the teeny tiny type that said "Abridged." That's a waste of a download. I've previously listened to this on cassette tape while driving from Seattle to NYC -- yes, that's how long this fantastic omnibus of information took to listen to. Very disappointed to see an audio file only at ~3 hours long....blech.

Audible has some work to do.

His book should be required reading. Yergin and Audible shoudl be ashamed they have taken people's money with this abridgement.

I did not notice this was abridged until I was well into the book. This was so abridged as to be nearly worthless. In addition, the story was quite bland, not quite journalism, not quite history, not very technical, not expressing a particular opinion. The narration was good. Having listened to The Quest (which was pretty good), if Audible adds the unabridged version, I might give this one an unabridged chance. I would not recommend this version to anyone.

Daniel Yergin's original version of The Prize was published in 1991. Recently he has published a rework with the dust cover which is shown on the Audible listing above. This current Audible presentation is just an update of the original book "The Prize" and only deals with developing history of the world oil business from 1965 to 2007. To get the whole story one must still read the original publication or the recently published update. This Audible volume is quite good but is a truncated version and does not include the whole book the author completed in 2007 to include the material of the earlier work. If the listener has not read "The Prize" he will have missed all the development of the oil business in the United States and its impact on the history of the 20th Century.

They cut out the history of the oil companies and only covered the politics of mid 20th century oil. Not good for me. I thought it was the full book.

This is a very interesting book, but the abridged version is too abrupt. It's quite clear that something is missing.

This book is a very concise and thoughtful representation of the oil industries goals and profit driven motives. However, I found the brevity to be a disappointment rather than a boon. I really enjoy the energy realm, the discoveries, and the politics. This was just a scratch on the surface when I probably would've preferred something a little more in-depth. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in the oil industry without very much prior exposure to the area.

I would listen to the Prize again because it is a concise history of middle eastern oil politics. There is much to be said about the middle east, but Yergin stays focused on his topic. The result is a listen which can be repeated without committing days or weeks.

very informative, very detailed, and a good story. really they need to update this book about every 5 years though to get it as up to date as possible. include the Iraq war etc.