Reviews for Great American outpost : dreamers, mavericks, and the making of an oil frontier

Library Journal
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This first book by reporter Rao (-Minneapolis Star Tribune) offers an eye-opening account of the North Dakota oil boom and its effects on the state, citizens, and those working the Bakken oil fields. Rao spent 2015 and 2016 conducting interviews and immersing herself in the oil culture, and here explains that while North Dakota's frigid temperature used to keep people away, the oil rush attracted individuals to the area from across the country. This created more jobs than available housing and caused many workers-including a mix of dangerous, untrustworthy, and honest -characters-to seek shelter in tents and vehicles. While earning some of the highest salaries in the country, many individuals did little to help the state's economy as they came and went, destroying roads with trucks and equipment in the process. As some people were increasing their financial gains, prices plummeted and drilling became less profitable, which led to mass layoffs and struggling businesses. Rao further touches on the Trump administration's part to alter U.S. oil production with the approval of the Dakota Access Pipeline. VERDICT These intriguing real-life accounts will engage readers of history and current affairs. Highly recommended.-David Miller, Farmville P.L., NC © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.


Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Newspaper journalist Rao travels to remote western North Dakota to immerse herself in the boom-and-bust cycle of shale oil extraction.For more than a decade, the dangers of frackingdrilling deep into the Earth to extract shale oil using massive amounts of water and chemicalshave been widely reported: environmental degradation, earthquakes, outsized profits for the oil industry, lost savings for individuals scammed by get-rich-quick schemes, negatively transformed local economies, and deaths of itinerant oil field workers as well as local residents. Portions of Oklahoma, Texas, and Pennsylvania have received huge amounts of attention during the debates about fracking, but North Dakota, one of the most remote, frigid, and least populous of the 50 states, has been affected more heavily than any other. To understand the real situation among competing claims, Rao arrived from out of state, established a working relationship with a truck driver trying to earn a better living than he could in North Carolina, developed numerous other sources, lived in costly but substandard housing, existed on low-quality food, and placed herself in physical danger almost every day, emerging with an eye-opening, occasionally scattershot, "on-the-ground account of capitalism, industrialization, and rugged individualism" as well as "the power and failings of free enterprise." At some level, almost everybody involved in the business understood that the boom economy would collapse eventually, but the author found few who predicted that the bust would arrive in less than a decade. As a result, local businesses went broke, temporary environmental scarring became permanent, and western North Dakota became less desirable than ever as a place to settle, especially given the harsh weather and downturn in agriculture. Rao occasionally injects herself into the story, but the truck driver who freely shared his adventures rightly dominates the book.A superbly reported book marred only by an occasionally wandering narrative. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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