Astonishing developments.

• Author: Verleger, Philip K., Jr.
• Position: Book review

A review of THE FRACKERS: The Outrageous Inside Story of the New Billionaire Wildcatters, by Gregory Zuckerman, Portfolio Hardcover, 2013

There are two primary approaches to telling complicated economic stories. The first is academic in nature, that is, it involves a carefully presented examination of the underlying data and events characterizing a historical period, often bolstered by references to current theory. The second method may be described as "contextual." The authors of this type of history reveal a particular time through the stories of its key participants.

Economists tend to prefer the academic approach, even though it often fails to reach a wide audience. The success of the late Charles Kindleberger (Manias, Panics, and Crashes) and Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart (This Time Is Different) mark two rare anomalies to this rule.

Professional journalists and writers, as well as a few academics, have done much better in reaching a broad readership using the second approach. New York Times reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin, for example, presented a very readable review of the 2008 financial collapse in Too Big to Fail. Liaquat Ahamed was equally effective with his book Lords of Finance, which chronicles how the heads of the four leading central banks attempted to deal with the 1920s financial crisis.

I am certain that Sorkin and Ahamed have helped a much larger audience understand the events leading up to the recent financial crisis and the Great Depression than other authors. In truth, most people learn more from well-written, easy-to-read volumes than from the often turgid prose of economists.

Gregory Zuckerman, a writer for the Wall Street Journal, will likely enjoy the same success with his new contextual history, The Frackers. In it, he describes the astonishing developments in energy production over the last decade. His engaging prose details how entrepreneurs such as George Mitchell, Aubrey McClendon, Harold Hamm, and Mark Papa have altered the future of global energy markets.

The story begins with the large integrated oil companies. Thirty years ago, these companies and every energy policymaker believed world oil and gas supplies would increasingly come from reserves in harsher, more distant locations. They also believed the United States was finished as an oil and gas producer, destined to become ever more dependent on imported oil. Many thought this dependence would weaken the United States and ultimately doom it to...