Nine-tenths of a cent. What's that about? It won't buy you a piece of penny candy, but it will buy you a gallon of gasoline, along with 200 or 300 more pennies.

It's called the hidden penny. Not that it's a penny, since it comes up short, and not that it's hidden, since something so puzzling is unlikely to escape notice. Yet it is equally unlikely that we give it much thought. That suits the oil companies just fine: Each year, that near-penny adds $1.26 billion to their coffers. That's a lot of penny candy.

Surprising nuggets such as the hidden penny come by the fistful in "Oil on the Brain," Lisa Margonelli's illuminating, entertaining stories of "people who oversee oil's long journey to our cars." Starting at her neighborhood filling station, she scurries up the pump like Alice down the rabbit hole, to discover and chronicle the delivery trucks, refineries, drilling rigs, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, the oil market and, most tellingly, the voracious consumers, who daily go about changing the world with as much concern as they give that hidden penny.

Simply put, oil rules. It is an indispensable part of our omnivorous diet: meat, vegetables, fruit, grain, nuts, petroleum. Our nation's infrastructure of roadways and interstates is a result of oil. It fuels our military and our economy. We will go to war over access to it, and our foreign policy will bend to its demands. It keeps us on the go. And, often enough, we are going to the gas station.

In the background are the great energy oligopolies, but the object of our immediate ire, when gasoline prices tick up another dime or quarter, is the filling station. We live by our cars. When we are denied, as during times of shortage or embargo, our very characters are compromised. "The whole definition of being American was that we drove our cars anywhere we wanted to. Public transit and waiting in line was something communists did," writes Margonelli, tongue in cheek...

For the complete review, please visit The San Francisco Chronicle website.