Publisher 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.
Download and start listening now!
From the upper reaches of North Dakota, Maya Rao extracts a potent metaphor for modern American capitalism. Her bracing dispatch from the Bakken reveals the toll of fracking on everything it touches – from the soil of the Great Plains, to the precarious lives of roughnecks, to the remote communities that became boomtowns full of hustlers, dreamers and opportunists. Keenly observed and vividly told, Great American Outpost also has an undercurrent of anxiety that seeps from abandoned oilfields into the larger landscape of our culture, in the form of a question few dare to ask: What remains when the profiteers move on?
—
–Jessica Bruder, author of Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century AmericaÂ
