The British Petroleum explosion in the Gulf of Mexico happened in April, and publishers have moved quickly to release books on the debacle. By June, St. Martin's Michael Flamini had pre-empted journalist Mike Magner's book on BP in a major six-figure deal (due Mar. 2011), and in July, OR Books, the startup behind the Sarah Palin spoof Going Rouge, had crashed In Deep Water: The Anatomy of a Disaster, the Fate of the Gulf, and How to End Our Oil Addiction by Peter Lehner with Bob Deans. Here are three more books out now or coming soon.
Disaster on the Horizon: The Deepwater Well Blowout: What Happened and Why by Bob Cavnar
(Chelsea Green)
Pub Date: Print books ship by October 15; e-books on sale sooner.
Backstory: Cavnar and publisher Margo Baldwin discussed an oil industry book last year; once the spill happened, he wrote it in a month.
Author: Cavnar was most recently president and CEO of Milagro Exploration, an oil and gas exploration firm with operations on the Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi Gulf Coasts, and in the Gulf of Mexico.
Blowout in the Gulf: The BP Oil Spill Disaster and the Future of Energy in America by William R. Freudenburg and Robert Gramling
(MIT Press)
Pub Date: E-book available now; print book ready October 21.
Backstory: MIT has never produced a book so quickly; the publisher received the manuscript in late August and edited it within a month.
Author: Freudenburg is Dehlsen professor of environmental studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara; Gramling is professor of sociology at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.
In Too Deep: BP and the Drilling Race That Took It Down by Stanley Reed and Alison Fitzgerald
(Bloomberg Press)
Pub Date: Print and e-books will pub in January.
Backstory: In June, John Wiley's Pamela van Giessen (Wiley had just acquired Bloomberg Press) learned Bloomberg had BP beat reporters and contacted them.
Author: Reed is a journalist who has covered BP for more than 10 years; Fitzgerald is an investigative reporter. Both write for Bloomberg.
