Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century

"This book is about energy, how energy volatility is a fact of geopolitical life and has determined how international policymakers have behaved over decades, certainly throughout the postwar period. She lays out pretty clearly why that is a problem and will continue to be a problem. It’s about how different types of energy—from oil to electricity, even renewable energy —have had the ability to create the tensions that exploded in Ukraine and elsewhere as a result of Russia cutting back gas supplies. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter This book was written before the Ukraine crisis, although things were obviously bubbling in Ukraine while she was writing. I suppose the book might have fallen down on the fact that events moved on and I’m sure if she were writing it now, adding an epilogue or a new edition, it would take into account the consequences of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. But what she’s laid out in the broad sweep of history is how the choices that companies make are related to the energy sources that they want to secure or use or on which they depend. It’s a state of the world book, in some respects, and as it says in the subtitle, these are hard problems we are now wrestling with. The book made its way onto the shortlist—and the longlist—by being one of those books that just hit the mark on timing. Of course, that’s a lottery to some degree, but she’s put a lot of work into this thesis which I think probably will also stand the test of time. Part of our best books of 2022 series."