The discovery of one of the world's most promising oil frontiers along Africa's west coast has seen the area touted as a prime investment destination. But talk of the reinvention of a continent masks a more troubling truth. The dirty trade in African resources has been grossly underreported. We have failed to grasp the importance of African commodities in our daily lives, be it the Guinean aluminium in our cutlery or the Nigerian petrol in our cars. As our dependency on these resources increases, the stories of those who live under their curse become all the more urgent. In this vital and arresting book, investigative journalist Tom Burgis hunts out the human stories both of the power brokers who run the looting machine and of those whose lives have been shattered by it, discovering how the price of the raw ingredients that fuel the global economy is rightly measured not in dollars, but in minds scarred and lives lost.