This was a large format picture book about the development of the oil industry from the first strikes in the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-thirties. Why it stopped there I don't know since it was published by Texas A&M University in 1977. I was sorry that it had disturbingly little to say about the environmental impact of oil. It has lots of photographs, all gray-scale, and quite a bit of text, which drily details the discovery and development.
Very few personal names mentioned here meant anything to me, although some I recognized, such as Howard Hughes's father, and his founding of the Hughes Tool Company which led to the more famous Junior's fortune. Parts of this story were interesting, but after a while it seemed quite repetitive and somewhat tedious as we got to read the same story over and over again, only set in a different exploited oil field spreading in a wide reversed 'C' shape across Texas, from Wink in the west, up to Phillips in the north, curving around through the charmingly-named Oil Springs in the east, and then down along the Gulf Coast to Corpus Christi in the south.
While there are some interesting and revealing photos of those early days, and some useful text here and there about the rough life some of those oil workers were forced to lead, my recommendation is to find what you need online in Wikipedia and other such sources unless you really and truly want a coffee-table book about oil.
I was disappointed that there was virtually nothing about what all this oil was used for prior to the burgeoning onset of massive motor transportation. Clearly it had other and valued uses - as a lubricant, for example, and a source of heating and even lighting perhaps, but there's almost nothing said about that. Overall I don't regret reading it, but I felt rather cheated that there wasn't more meat to it. The cover does make it clear that it's a photographic history, but still!
