Blowout is a lot of interesting notecards, and a lot of red string, but falls short of presenting a compelling narrative.

The topline thesis should be easy enough. Oil and gas extraction is a business which has made some people incredibly wealthy and mass prosperity possible. It is also corrupt, has catastrophic environmental costs, and is willing to see the planet destroyed rather than accept any regulation or limits on its power.

Some of the cast of characters are big figures. Vladimir Putin, Rex Tillerson, John Rockefeller. But there's lots of interest in lesser luminaries, like Chesapeake Energy CEO Aubrey McClendon, who pioneering fracking and leveraged his company to destruction and himself to antitrust investigation and probable suicide. Harold Hamm made a lot of money fracking, and then pushed the Oklahoma legislature to enact permanent tax breaks for fracking. Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue, son of the corrupt President of Equatorial Guinea, spends millions on a Malibu shopaholic lifestyle, which his county is one of the most impoverished in the world.

The two key events are the growth of fracking in the United States, and Putin's 'energy diplomacy' policy in Europe. Fracking, the injection of high-pressure water into horizontally drilled wells to break up rock formations and liberate oil and gas, has unlocked massive new fossil fuel reserves. It also produces billions of gallons of saline wastewater laden with heavy metals and radioactive particles, and likely causes earthquakes in regions which have been seismically inert for centuries. Putin saw Russia's energy reserves as key weapon in maintaining Russia's great power status, and his personal power, but corruption and US sanctions have hampered Russia's energy policy.

There are lots of interesting pieces here, but as a coherent narrative, especially one about our collective involvement in the energy business, Blowout doesn't quite hit home. I read it, and my wife listened to it as an audiobook, and I think that the latter format might play better to Maddow's strengths, she's a good author and a great newshost, and this works better an extended special episode of her show, rather than a serious book.