3.5
Great American Outpost
ByPublisher Description
A surreal, lyrical work of narrative nonfiction that portrays how the largest domestic oil discovery in half a century transformed a forgotten corner of the American West into a crucible of breakneck capitalism.
As North Dakota became the nation's second-largest oil producer, Maya Rao set out in steel-toe boots to join a wave of drifters, dreamers, entrepreneurs, and criminals. With an eye for the dark, absurd, and humorous, Rao fearlessly immersed herself in their world to chronicle this modern-day gold rush, from its heady beginnings to OPEC's price war against the US oil industry. She rode shotgun with a surfer-turned-truck driver braving toxic fumes and dangerous roads, dined with businessmen disgraced during the financial crisis, and reported on everyone in between -- including an ex-con YouTube celebrity, a trophy wife mired in scandal, and a hard-drinking British Ponzi schemer--in a social scene so rife with intrigue that one investor called the oilfield Peyton Place on steroids.
As the boom receded, a culture of greed and recklessness left troubling consequences for investors and longtime residents. Empty trailers and idle oil equipment littered the fields like abandoned farmsteads, leaving the pioneers who built this unlikely civilization to reckon with their legacy. Part Barbara Ehrenreich, part Upton Sinclair, Great American Outpost is a sobering exploration of twenty-first-century America that reads like a frontier novel.
As North Dakota became the nation's second-largest oil producer, Maya Rao set out in steel-toe boots to join a wave of drifters, dreamers, entrepreneurs, and criminals. With an eye for the dark, absurd, and humorous, Rao fearlessly immersed herself in their world to chronicle this modern-day gold rush, from its heady beginnings to OPEC's price war against the US oil industry. She rode shotgun with a surfer-turned-truck driver braving toxic fumes and dangerous roads, dined with businessmen disgraced during the financial crisis, and reported on everyone in between -- including an ex-con YouTube celebrity, a trophy wife mired in scandal, and a hard-drinking British Ponzi schemer--in a social scene so rife with intrigue that one investor called the oilfield Peyton Place on steroids.
As the boom receded, a culture of greed and recklessness left troubling consequences for investors and longtime residents. Empty trailers and idle oil equipment littered the fields like abandoned farmsteads, leaving the pioneers who built this unlikely civilization to reckon with their legacy. Part Barbara Ehrenreich, part Upton Sinclair, Great American Outpost is a sobering exploration of twenty-first-century America that reads like a frontier novel.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesGreat American Outpost Reviews
3.5
“As someone who worked in the energy industry for more than 40 years, I was immediately drawn to Maya Rao's "Great American Outpost." I missed out on seeing the Bakkan Play explosion in North Dakota, but heard many tales over the years about what life was like up there during the boom years - the years when the state was almost overrun by oil company personnel and their subcontractors, plus every shyster, con-man, and ex-con who could find his way there. Having witnessed firsthand what it is like when multiple oil companies descend upon an area to get oil leases signed before the competition can get it done, my automatic sympathies were with the landowners and longtime residents of that part of the state. And, from what Rao has to say in her book, those sympathies were well-placed.
The energy industry is one of periodic boom or bust, with everything based on the commodity pricing of crude oil itself. Because it is difficult to predict a drop in crude prices, oil companies rush to make their money while prices support drilling costs, plus some profit. Service companies (including every existing business in that part of North Dakota) double and triple prices in order to get their own piece of the pie. Then, when the bottom drops out of pricing again, the mess is too often left for others to clean up...state and Federal money has to be spent.
Anyone wondering what a modern gold rush would be like, needs to read "Great American Outpost." As the book's subtitle says, it is an account of "dreamers, mavericks, and the making of an oil frontier." The book's glaring weakness, in my opinion, is that Rao ends it rather abruptly instead of detailing her own re-entry into the "normal" world - as well as others she features in the book handled it.”
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