Readers can best decipher Anthony Sampson’s book about the oil industry, The Seven Sisters (Bantam, $2.25), by swabbing the pages with a bit of lemon juice. The message is in there, but it is scratched in secret glyphs between the lines.
On first appraisal, Sampson’s impressionistic treatment would seem to confirm the usual stereotypes: swashbuckling, money-hungry, more than slightly sinister tycoons striving to grab the world’s petroleum resources in quest of mammoth profits. Just the thing to feed the popular paranoia about the alleged monopoly powers of the major oil firms.
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