Great American outpost : dreamers, mavericks, and the making of an oil frontier / Maya Rao
- Author
- Rao, Maya, 1984-
- Published
- New York : PublicAffairs, 2018.
- Copyright Date
- ©2018
- Edition
- First edition.
- Physical Description
- vii, 324 pages : illustrations, map ; 24 cm
- Contents
- I should be dead -- The water depot -- Before the eyes of Roosevelt -- The wild bison -- Williston Brewing Company -- Great American scam -- Street lights -- South of Sasketchewan -- Edge of the world -- The sheer emptiness of it -- Nobody lives here -- The fattest chicken in the barn -- Empire of junk -- The North Dakota way -- Capitalism is legal -- A great steaming pile of money -- Ballad of La Bruta -- The dinner party -- Peyton Place on the plains -- Fifteen Enrons -- Going to war -- The derrick goes sideways -- Oil to $1 beer -- Nat Geo's in town -- Fracking hell -- A convicted ponzi schemer walks into a bar -- The dangers at 20 feet -- Pipelining blues -- You chose oil over us -- Exodus -- Bile of the subterranean -- Frigid despair -- This is your treasure.
- Summary
- 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. She rode shotgun with a surfer-turned-truck driver braving toxic fumes and dangerous roads, dined with businessmen disgraced during the financial crisis, and interviewed 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.
- Subject(s)
- 2000-2099
- Petroleum industry and trade—Economic aspects—North Dakota
- Petroleum industry and trade—Social aspects—North Dakota
- Oil shale reserves—North Dakota
- TECHNOLOGY & ENGINEERING—Petroleum
- Oil fields
- Oil shale reserves
- Petroleum industry and trade—Economic aspects
- Petroleum industry and trade—Social aspects
- Oil fields—North Dakota—History
- North Dakota
- North Dakota—History—21st century
- Genre(s)
- ISBN
- 9781610396462 (hardcover)
1610396464 (hardcover) - Bibliography Note
- Includes bibliographical references (pages 315-324).
- Source of Acquisition
- Purchased with funds from the Paterno Libraries Endowment ; 2018
- Endowment Note
- Paterno Libraries Endowment
View MARC record | catkey: 25387880