Sherpas - perhaps in the form of your children, delivering sustaining tea and coffee and rum - will be required. Base camps will periodically need to be established on this 804-page mountain. This is a very large and not overly elegant book committing to it is like committing to a marriage, or to a car lease, or to climbing Everest. “The Quest” will be necessary reading for C.E.O.’s, conservationists, lawmakers, generals, spies, tech geeks, thriller writers, ambitious terrorists and many others.

Our heads may be buried in our sleek laptops and gadgets, his masterly book announces, but our toes are still soaking in dirty, morally contaminated oil. Yergin brooks no cant about climate-change denial, and lingers on the topic of cleaner future fuels. (Events like the partial meltdowns at the Fukushima nuclear complex in Japan, the political upheavals in Egypt and Libya, and the killing of Osama bin Laden, all from this year, are combed into his arguments.) Mr. It is searching, impartial and alarmingly up to date. Yergin is back with a sequel to “The Prize.” It is called “The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World,” and, if anything, it’s an even better book. Such is his influence that one half expects his competitors to file antitrust litigation against him. Yergin, operating as a kind of one-man think tank, has had a virtual monopoly on the subject of energy and geopolitics. It was a best seller, won a Pulitzer Prize and was tailored into a popular PBS mini-series.

Daniel Yergin is America’s most influential energy pundit, and the book that put him on the map was “The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power” (1991).

The prize quest for oil money and power