Great American Outpost: Fortune, Freedom, and Madness in the North Dakota Oilfield

I received a DIGITAL Advance Reader Copy of this book from #NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. From the publisher - The story of the twenty-first-century gold rush to the gas and oil fields of North Dakota--and of the migrants, criminals, and oil barons willing to do whatever it takes to cash in The word was that you could earn $17,000 a month in the Bakken Oil Field of North Dakota. So they flooded in: the pioneers, outcasts, dreamers, failures, drifters, deadbeats, profiteers, and felons. And so did Maya Rao, a journalist from neighboring Minnesota who in 2015 embedded herself in the surreal new American frontier. With an eye for the dark, humorous, and absurd, Rao set out in steel-toe boots to chronicle the largest oil boom since the 1968 discovery of oil in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, reporting from truck stops, oil tanks, and North Dakota bars. Part Barbara Ehrenreich, part Upton Sinclair, this is an on-the-ground narrative of capitalism and industrialization as a rural, insular community transformed into a colony of outsiders hustling for profit--a sobering exploration of twenty-first-century America that reads like a frontier novel.

I have family that moved to North Dakota in search of the dream, much like those who went to the Yukon Goldrush and the Goldrush in California --- all hoping to become million/billionaires just like that family in the (awful) TV show "Oil". The oil is there as is everyone trying to make money off of the workers --- many live in drafty, cold, FEMA-like trailers and are bombarded with high prices everywhere around them from everything to the grocery store to the prostitutes. BUT THEY CAN AFFORD IT.

This is not "new news" -- just ask anyone who lives in Fort McMurray, Alberta (Canada) and has these problems around them ... young men making money hand over fist and very little to do but drink and watch strippers there to make THEIR fortune.

Greed is not always good and Maya Rao, the author, brings that out in a wonderfully written book that at times made me shake my head and wonder if it was actually a novel I was reading. Five stars for sure!!!