We live in an age of teetering empires, never quite ready to fall, eras not quite ready to end, their final crisis the subject of an ever-expanding literature of reportage. In these two books it is the end of the oil age that is chronicled. Peter Maass's Crude World (Allen Lane, £20) tells the story through snapshots of the critical situations; Tom Bower's The Squeeze uses profiles of the big players. Both books, tellingly, appear shorn of profound conclusions other than the obvious: oil dependence has left humanity in a mess."We face an era of scarcity that involves higher prices for oil and fiercer competition for what's left. We are a foggy-headed boxer on his knees, unaware of the blow that awaits us," Maass writes.


In Crude World, Maass establishes that we face a resource crunch as a result of the peaking of the world's oil supply, and documents the human misery the industry has inflicted in its scramble for resources. He uses the first-person narrative of a veteran oil journalist: it is gripping when he is wading through shit and violence in the Niger Delta; it can seem slightly overcooked when he is only wading through bullshit in a boardroom Powerpoint session. Nevertheless the narrative is compelling. Maass hears the human story – not just of those who suffer from the pollution, bribery and violence that attend the global oil industry, but of the repentant crooks, failed bosses, exasperated soldiers.

By the end of Crude World you have a series of snapshots of how real power flows in the world; the world Maass describes is not the orderly one that governments, corporations and UN diplomats believe they are running. It is a disorderly, corrupt and violent world in which the real power flows around the official channels: a Slovak businessman points a gun at the head of a negotiator in Baku; the employee of an elite US bank carries suitcases filled with hundred-dollar bills out of an African embassy in Washington; the world's great corporate violators of human rights make mirthless speeches in favour of human rights in front of vast pinstriped chow-downs.