No longer simply a handbook for Aramco employees, this volume provides background information on Islam, the Arab world, and the oil industry.

The extraordinary memoir of global oil's former central banker Ali Al-Naimi is the former Saudi oil minister - and OPEC kingpin - a position he held for the two decades between August 1995 and May 2016. In this time, Al-Naimi's briefest utterances moved markets. But it wasn't always that way. Al-Naimi was born into abject poverty as a nomadic Bedouin in the 1930s, just as US companies were discovering vast quantities of oil under the baking Arabian deserts. From his first job as a shepherd boy, aged four, to his appointment to one of the most powerful political and economic jobs in the world, Out of the Desert charts Al-Naimi's extraordinary rise to power. Described by Alan Greenspan as 'the most powerful man you've never heard of', Al-Naimi's incredible journey proves that anyone can make it - even a poor Bedouin shepherd boy. This is his exclusive inside story of power, politics and oil. His Excellency Ali Ibrahim Al-Naimi is the former Minister of Petroleum and Mineral Resources for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. One of the most powerful economic and political jobs in the world, he held this post from August 1995 to May 2016. Prior to that he held a wide range of leadership positions in the Kingdom's national oil company, Saudi Aramco. He was the first Saudi national to be named President of the company in 1984 and became the first Saudi CEO in 1988. Al-Naimi joined the company, then called Aramco, as an office boy in 1947. A Bedouin, he was born in the deserts of eastern Arabia in 1935.

Saudi Arabia is a young nation with an ancient history. It is one of the most conservative traditional societies in the world grappling with the impact of modernization wrought by the influx of great oil wealth beginning only in the mid twentieth century. Saudi culture is in constant flux, and the culture gap between the West and Saudi Islamic culture is wide. Culture and Customs of Saudi Arabia is the first cultural overview of country and provides timely, authoritative insight into a major Middle Eastern power. The Saudis are a proud people with a closed society, but circumstances have caused them to play an important role in current world affairs. The author has lived and worked in Saudi Arabia and has extensively used his contacts there to provide up-to-date material. Saudi culture developed through age-old interactions between the Arabian peoples and their harsh desert environment. Saudi Arabia is the birthplace of Islam, and the basic Islamic values of Saudi culture have remained to this day. The themes of an ancient desert society infused with Islam values on a collision course with modernity are interplayed throughout chapters on the land, people, and history, traditional Islamic culture and modernization, the extended family and gender roles, cuisine and dress, social customs, rites of passage, and holidays, communication and mass media, and artistic expression. Color photos and a map, chronology, and glossary round out the narrative.

Now newly updated, America's Kingdom debunks the many myths that now surround the United States's special relationship with Saudi Arabia, also known as "the deal": oil for security. Exploding the long-established myth that the Arabian American Oil Company, Aramco, made miracles happen in the desert, Robert Vitalis shows how oil led the US government to follow the company to the kingdom, and how oil and Aramco quickly became America's largest single overseas private enterprise. From the establishment in the 1930s of a Jim Crow system in the Dhahran oil camps, to the consolidation of America's Kingdom under the House of Fahd, the royal faction that still rules today, this is a meticulously researched account of Aramco as a microcosm of the colonial order.