Feb. 9 (Bloomberg) -- The shrike is a bird known for its habit of catching small mammals, birds and insects and impaling their bodies on thorns. It's a rapacious hunter and obsessive hoarder that often stores more food than it can eat.

And it's among the most compelling characters in "Oil on the Brain," Lisa Margonelli's oil-industry travelogue.

In a chapter on the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, Margonelli learns about the shrike from a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Energy, who tells her it has made the salt caverns of the SPR its home.

"Think of the shrike as a conspicuous stockpiler, an obsessive-compulsive hoarder with an exhibitionist bent," she writes. "It seemed fitting that the shrike lives in the SPR. Like the SPR, the shrike keeps a stash, but flaunts it, even when it has no intention of using it. The question is: What effect does an ostentatious stockpile have on the world around it?"

Margonelli finds in the shrike's behavior a perfect metaphor for the predations of the U.S. oil industry and the U.S. government against Third World nations. She further finds the American public complicit in this shrikish hunger for oil...

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