Great American Outpost
Dreamers, Mavericks, and the Making of an Oil Frontier
by Maya Rao
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Pub Date Apr 24 2018 | Archive Date Apr 23 2018
Perseus Books, PublicAffairs | PublicAffairs
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Description
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.
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9781610396462 |
| PRICE | $27.00 (USD) |
| PAGES | 336 |
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Featured Reviews
Geoffrey S, Librarian
Rents for apartments on par with San Francisco out in the far northwest of Dakota. A local minimum wage needs to be at least $14 to keep up with the amount of money that is flowing around. People who arrive from around the country with little more than the shirts on their backs quickly finding jobs that let them make six figures, yet forced to live in vans or in crowded apartments a la freshly graduated college students. Conmen of all shapes and sizes converging together into some of the northernmost reaches of the upper midwest to carry out scams of all sorts in order to try and get a piece of the pie.
These are only a few examples from a world of literally life-threatening daily work, cutthroat greed, rural communities in chaos, wild breakneck boom, and heartbreaking bust that are so thoroughly-documented in this work by Maya Rao. At one point, a man under investigation from the SEC, a woman soon to be busted for a multi-state drug ring, and a man wrapped up in a massive waste-dumping scandal are all eating dinner together at a party in a swanky new housing development. Yet because Rao's documentation of all the absurdities of life around the Bakken Formation at the the height of the rush is so thorough, this scene doesn't feel even half as outrageous in the context of the book as it sounds here.
"Great American Outpost" is a magnificent work of modern-day journalistic writing that is exhaustive in coverage of its topic. Thanks to Rao's hard work, you are going to be incredibly hard-pressed to find a more intimate look at life in the oil fields of North Dakota.
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