Oil on the Brain: Adventures From the Pump to the Pipeline.
By Lisa Margonelli. Doubleday. $26. 325 pages.

Verdict: A fascinating drive.

Like many journalists, Lisa Margonelli knows a little bit about a lot of topics. Like many freelance writers, she moves from one unrelated topic to another, depending on what strikes her fancy and on what an editor will buy.

On Oct. 28, 2002, Margonelli took a fancy to writing about oil. The result is a book in which she shows she knows a lot about one topic. Those who read to the end of the simultaneously breezy and serious book will know a lot, too...

Margonelli, who lives in Oakland, Calif., decided she would travel the globe "to hear stories from the people who oversee oil's long journey to our cars." She wanted to understand oil in a deeper manner than the fluctuating price of its derivative, gasoline, at the service station pump...

The structure of Margonelli's narrative is unexpected, even daring, as she works backward along the demand-supply chain. She starts the book at the service station pump, because it's the most familiar manifestation to the largest number of readers. Then she tackles the distribution, refining and drilling, in that order...

"Nothing was as I expected," she writes of a gas station, a seemingly familiar and uncomplicated site. "The one thing I thought I had a handle on --- the price of gasoline, which is updated frequently and displayed prominently on large signs --- turned out to be a chimera, albeit a fascinating one that reveals much about the behavior of American gasoline consumers and our role in the world."

While oil never leaves center stage, Margonelli does a masterful job of humanizing its passage from underground to pump handle...

For the complete review, please visit The Atlanta Journal-Constitution website.