We all have been seeing constant news coverage of the BP Oil Disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, but since the news media in this country rarely provides us with substantive analysis on these events or the oil industry in general, we wanted to recommend to you two valuable resources.

The Tyranny of Oil: The World’s Most Powerful Industry – and What We Must Do to Stop It – Antonia Juhasz, author of The Bush Agenda, has given us one of the best books ever written about the oil industry. In the tradition of Ida Tarbell, The Tyranny of Oil exposes the insidious inner workings of the global oil cartel. Juhasz begins with an overview of Big Oil’s origins and how they have evolved into what they are today. The author looks at how Big Oil buys politicians, causes major health problems and devastates eco-systems around the world. The Tyranny of Oil is an important contribution for anyone interested in a world that respects people and the planet.

Crude: The Real Price of Oil – Three years in the making, this cinéma-vérité feature from acclaimed filmmaker Joe Berlinger (Brother’s Keeper, Paradise Lost, Metallica: Some Kind of Monster) is the epic story of one of the largest and most controversial environmental lawsuits on the planet. The inside story of the infamous “Amazon Chernobyl” case, Crude is a real-life high stakes legal drama, set against a backdrop of the environmental movement, global politics, celebrity activism, human rights advocacy, the media, multinational corporate power, and rapidly-disappearing indigenous cultures. Presenting a complex situation from multiple viewpoints, the film subverts the conventions of advocacy filmmaking, exploring a complicated situation from all angles while bringing an important story of environmental peril and human suffering into focus.