What You’ll Uncover in Maya Rao Great American Outpost Dreamers, Mavericks, and the Making of an Oil Frontier
Maya Rao – Great American Outpost: Dreamers, Mavericks, and the Making of an Oil Frontier
A surreal, lyrical work of narrative nonfiction that portrays how the largest home oil discovery in half a century reworked a forgotten nook of the American West right into a crucible of breakneck capitalism.
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As North Dakota turned the nation’s second-largest oil producer, Maya Rao set out in metal-toe boots to hitch a wave of drifters, dreamers, entrepreneurs, and criminals. With an eye for the darkish, absurd, and humorous, Rao fearlessly immersed herself of their world to chronicle this contemporary-day gold rush, from its heady beginnings to OPEC’s worth conflict in opposition to the US oil business. She rode shotgun with a surfer-turned-truck driver braving poisonous fumes and harmful roads, dined with businessmen disgraced throughout the monetary disaster, and reported on everybody in between–including an ex-con YouTube movie star, a trophy spouse mired in scandal, and a tough-consuming British Ponzi schemer–in a social scene so rife with intrigue that one investor known as the oilfield Peyton Place on steroids.
As the growth receded, a tradition of greed and recklessness left troubling penalties for buyers and longtime residents. Empty trailers and idle oil tools littered the fields like deserted farmsteads, leaving the pioneers who constructed this unlikely civilization to reckon with their legacy. Half Barbara Ehrenreich, half Upton Sinclair, Great American Outpost is a sobering exploration of twenty-first-century America that reads like a frontier novel.
Overview
“An important addition to the literature of the U.S. shale revolution-too often underestimated and misunderstood-Great American Outpost reminds us that the revolution is not just a story of frack fluid and oil production but a story of the human experience. Through Didionesque scenes of the North Dakota boom, Maya Rao evokes America in extremis with glimpses of lives and decisions that are sometimes frightening, sometimes inspiring, and sometimes just nuts.”―–Gary Sernovitz, creator of The Inexperienced and the Black: The Full Story of the Shale Revolution, the Combat over Fracking, and the Future of Vitality
“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, creator of Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century America
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“I’m grateful for this stunning work of immersive reportage. Maya Rao tells us a tale from ground zero for modern American capitalism: the North Dakota oil rush, from boom to bust. It’s a remarkable book for right now, mixing compelling portraits with smart, big picture analysis. Rao shows us stories that visiting reporters would likely miss, and the result is a rich, nuanced book that’s a crucial guide to understanding twenty-first century America.”―–Tracie McMillan, creator of The American Method of Consuming: Undercover at Walmart, Applebee’s, Farm Fields and the Dinner Desk
“With oil at $100 a barrel, greed in North Dakota was manifest and the characters were right out of the Gold Rush, from some of the craziest get rich crooks to the recently paroled who could make $90,000 a year hurling big trucks down two-lane roads. Maya Rao’s description of one of America’s biggest rushes of sheer greed ranks right up there with the great books of the California Gold Rush of 1849 …This is one of the best books in America about working men and women — and life in the oilfields when the lid blows off.”―–Humpy Wheeler, retired NASCAR promoter and former president of Charlotte Motor Speedway
“Maya Rao didn’t just write about the boomtown life, she lived it capturing the hope and despair of a nation of citizens looking for a break. A gimlet-eyed look at the oil, dust, and, most importantly, the people living on our country’s last frontier. This is essential reading for anyone interested in how the American Dream or the American Nightmare can be made and lost in the blink of a two-week pay period.”―–Stephen Rodrick, contributing editor to Rolling Stone
About the Writer
Maya Rao is a employees author in the Washington D.C. bureau of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, and her work has appeared in the Atlantic, Axe, Philadelphia Inquirer, Longreads, and extra.
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