Great American Outpost: Dreamers, Mavericks, and the Making of an Oil Frontier - Maya Rao

As someone who worked in the energy industry for more than 40 years, I was immediately drawn to Maya Rao's Great American Outpost. I missed out on seeing the Bakkan-Play explosion in North Dakota when it happened, but I heard many tales over the years about what life was like up there during the boom years. Those were the years during which the state was almost overrun by oil company personnel and their subcontractors - plus every shyster, con-man, and ex-con who got wind of what was happening up there. Having witnessed firsthand what it is like when multiple oil companies descend upon an area to get oil leases signed before the competition can beat them to it, my automatic sympathies were with the landowners and longtime residents of that part of North Dakota. And, from what Rao has to say in her Great American Outpost, my sympathies were well-placed.

The energy industry is one of periodic boom or bust, with everything being based on the commodity pricing of crude oil itself. Because the bottom can fall out of crude oil prices overnight, oil companies rush in to make their money while prices support drilling cost plus a decent level of profit. At the same time, oil service companies (plus every non-oil related business in that part of North Dakota) will be doubling and tripling their own prices in order to get the biggest piece of the pie they can grab while the grabbing is good. That usually works out OK for the oil companies, their employees, and the service companies; but it is the worst possible thing that can ever happen to the people whose home turf has been invaded by all the outsiders who show up to make a quick buck. Suddenly, the longtime residents can no longer afford to live in their own community. 

Maya Rao

And then, when the bottom ultimately does drop out of crude oil pricing, the resulting collapse is all too often left for others to clean up . State and Federal tax money often has to be spent on environmental cleanups and the reconstruction of roads and highways, and the businesses that serviced the area before the boom are long gone by the time everyone leaves town. In that sense, it’s akin to having a Super Walmart come to town and force all the mom-and-pop stores out of business only to close its own doors as soon as everything else has been driven out of business.

Anyone wondering what a nineteenth century gold rush was like, needs only to read Great American Outpost. As the book's subtitle says, this is an episodic account of "dreamers, mavericks, and the making of an oil frontier." The book's glaring weakness, in my opinion, is that Rao ends it rather abruptly instead of detailing her return to the "normal" world after having spent so long in such a different world. Having known several people who were in North Dakota at the peak of the craziness there, I know that’s not always an easy thing to do, and I would have enjoyed hearing how Rao and some of her “characters” dealt with the re-entry process. 

How August 3 Gives and Takes Famous Authors

I stumbled upon something about yesterday, August 3, that strikes me as being a little unusual. August 3 seems to be one of those days on the calendar on which a handful of prominent authors were born, and on which an equally prominent handful died. 

August 3 gave us these three authors:

P.D. James

P.D. James in 1920 - writer of crime fiction, thrillers, and dystopian fiction who is best known as creator of the Adam Dalgliesh detective series. James received the Grandmaster award from the Mystery Writers of America in 1999. (My personal favorite of her's is 1973's An Unsuitable Job for a Woman.)

Leon Uris

Leon Uris in 1924 - author of historical fiction who is probably best known for 1958's Exodus, a novel focusing on the history of Palestine that ends with the founding of Israel in 1948. Other Leon Uris novels include, Mila 18 (1961), Trinity (1976), and The Haj (1984), three novels that I actually prefer to Exodus. Uris also wrote the screenplay for the 1957 movie Gunfight at the O.K. Corral starring Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas.

Stephen Milhauser

Stephen Milhauser in 1943 - author of the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winner Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer, a cynical look at the American Dream as lived by a man who, no matter how many times his business dreams come true, is never really satisfied with his life. His short story "Eisenheim the Illusionist" was made into the 2006 movie The Illusionist starring Edward Norton and Paul Giamatti (one of my favorite movies), but

August 3 also took these three from us:

Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad in 1924 (the same day that Leon Uris was born, you will notice) - a highly influential author whose novels include some of the most famous and studied novels ever written, among them: Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness, Typhoon, Nostromo, and The Secret Agent. His work has been adapted for over two dozen movies and television shows, and even one video game from 2012 that was based on Heart of Darkness.

Flannery O'Conner

Flannery O'Conner in 1964 at age 39 - author who is primarily known for her short stories but Wise Blood, one of her two novels, was adapted for a 1953 movie by the same name and then remade into a 1979 movie starring Harry Dean Stanton, John Huston, and Ned Beatty. O'Conner knew that she was always going to be labeled a Southern writer, and I get a kick out of her quote regarding how she was perceived by readers up North, "anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic." She saw right through their prejudices.

Aleksander Solzhenitsyn

Aleksander Solzhenitsyn in 2008 - Russian novelist and essayist best known for Cancer Ward (novel), The Gulag Archipelago (3-volume history), and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (novella). A former Red Army officer, Solzhenitsyn was highly political and was not afraid to criticize both Russia and the West. He was imprisoned in Russia in 1945 and sent into exile after his 1953 release. His problems with Russian intelligence were, however, far from over.

And now I'm curious to see how August 3 compares to other days of the year when it comes to adding and subtracting famous authors.

The Nickel Boys - Colson Whitehead

The Nickel Boys is Colson Whitehead’s first novel since the immense success he had with The Underground Railroad.That one won six major literary prizes, including a National Book Award for Fiction in 2016, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2017, and the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction in 2017 – not to mention also being longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2017. A lightning bolt like that one is, of course, unlikely ever to strike Whitehead again, but The Nickel Boys is an outstanding novel, and its two main characters are memorable ones.

Elwood Curtis, a young black boy growing up in the Jim Crow era Tallahassee of the early 1960s, lives alone with his grandmother because a few years earlier his parents left him behind like an abandoned piece of furniture when they decided to leave for California in the middle of the night. They didn’t even wake the boy up to say goodbye. But with his grandmother’s guidance, Elwood has done so well that he is now a high school senior who will soon be attending college. However, even hard work cannot always compensate for simple bad luck, and because of one innocent mistake, Elwood is sentenced to a juvenile reformatory known as the Nickel Academy before he ever makes it to the college.

At first, Elwood thinks he may have gotten lucky in being assigned to Nickel because there are no walls around the facility and daily classroom instruction is provided for all of the reformatory’s inmates. He is shocked, however, when he finds that the boys in his class are struggling with the same first-grade primers that he mastered a decade earlier. The reality of the Nickel Academy is that it is staffed by a group of racist predators who seem to enjoy nothing more than beating and sexually abusing the boys under their supposed care. The academy is as segregated as any part of the Jim Crow South, and anything designated – dormitories, the mess hall, classrooms, books, uniforms, food – for use by its black population is definitely second class in comparison to what the white inmates receive. 

Colson Whitehead

Elwood knows, though, that if he just stays out of trouble and does everything asked of him, he will be able to earn an early release from Nickel. And that’s exactly the plan he sets out on right up until the moment he rashly decides to defend a smaller boy being bullied by three or four much larger thugs. Now labeled a troublemaker, Elwood learns firsthand what happens to those boys who are whisked away for punishment in the middle of the night – some of them never to be seen again. Only a few months before his incarceration, Elwood discovered the speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King, and now he relies on King’s message of non-violent protest and perseverance to get him through his roughest days. 

But as Elwood learns the hard way, if he is going to survive his time in Nickel, he will need more help than mere words will ever be able to provide.  He needs a friend he can trust, someone who will watch his back in an environment where neither staff nor fellow academy inmates should ever be trusted. That friend is Jack Turner, a less academic but more skeptical and worldly boy who understands exactly what is a stake in Nickel Academy and needs a friend of his own.

According to Whitehead, The Nickel Boys is based on the Dozier School for Boys that operated in Marianna, Florida, for 111 years before it was finally shut down. The author uses much of what he learned about the brutality of the Dozier administrative staff in his depiction of what Elwood and others endure at Nickel Academy. Whitehead’s message, other than his reflection on life in the Jim Crow era, is that even those who managed to survive incarceration in places like Dozier and Nickel had their lives forever warped by the experience. Few of these boys managed to become the men they otherwise would have been – and for the most part, no one was ever punished for what they did to them.

Happy Birthday, James Baldwin and Isabelle Allende

James Baldwin

It's a double-birthday celebration today for two very different authors, James Baldwin and Isabelle Allende. 

In recognition of Baldwin's birthday, this morning I pulled a compilation of his essays called Nobody Knows My Name from my shelves and read one from 1956 titled "Faulkner and Desegregation."  William Faulkner gave a drunken interview in 1956 in which he counseled black Southerners to "go slow" when it came to pushing for desegregation if they did not want to risk losing the support of more moderate Southerners like him. Faulkner claimed that Southerners were soon enough going to recognize how "silly" their social structure looked to the rest of the world, and that they would change it on their own - without undue pressure from the Supreme Court. 

In "Faulkner and Desegregation," Baldwin takes Faulkner to task for his remarks and exposes the ludicrousness of his advice. He was particularly offended by Faulkner's choice of the word "silly" to describe the culture in which Southern blacks were living. Baldwin closes the essay with some strong words of his own:

"But the time Faulkner asks for does not exist - and he is not the only Southerner who knows it. There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment, the time is always now."

James Baldwin was born ninety-five years ago on August 2, 1924 in Manhattan and he died of stomach cancer on December 1, 1987 in France at age 63.  He was the author of numerous novels, essay collections, short stories, plays, and poems, including one of my very favorite short stories, "Sonny's Blues."  

Isabelle Allende

Isabelle Allende was born in Lima, Peru on August 2, 1942 and turns 77 today. Her father, at the time of Allende's birth, was second secretary at the Chilean embassy there, and Allende now holds American-Chilean citizenship. Her father was a first cousin to Salvador Allende, one-time Marxist president of Chile. Although the critics have not always been kind to Allende, she has won awards almost too numerous to count, including in 2018 the National Book Award called the Lifetime Achievement Award for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Her work has been translated into 30 languages and has sold more than 56 million copies.

Over the years, I have particularly enjoyed Allende's two memoirs, My Invented Country and The Sum of Our Days because she has lived an interesting life, and has managed to reinvent herself more than once.  But my overall favorite of her books is probably 2015's The Japanese Lover, and I'm pleased to own a signed copy of that one. Of Allende's twenty works of fiction, twelve of them have been published since 2000, including this year's Long Petal of the Sea. 

So let's wish a happy birthday to James Baldwin and Isabell Allende, two of the best. 

Happy Birthday, Herman Melville

Happy 200th Birthday, Herman, this is a big one for you.  We have spent a lot of time together in the last few decades, and I have cursed your name more than a few times, but in the end it was all worth it.

I won't pretend to be a fan of Melville's writing, but it's not because I haven't tried. As I explain in the post below (one originally posted to Book Chase on August 31, 2013), the day that I finished reading Moby Dick was one of the proudest days of my reading life. I know that sounds a little strange, but considering that I finished the book more than 40 years after I first started it, I think you'll understand why I felt that way.

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An August 31, 2013 Post:

This is not a "review" of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick.  Another one of those wouldn’t do much good.  What follows are simply my thoughts and impressions on finally finishing a book that I first attempted, and failed to complete, more than four decades ago.  Since that first encounter, I have probably read the first quarter of Melville's classic another ten times without getting any further into the novel.  But this time I made it despite setting the book aside for two or three weeks at a time.  And I feel like I finally successfully climbed Everest.

Most everyone knows the basic plot of Moby-Dick: nineteenth-century whaler loses his leg to a ghostly white whale and becomes obsessed with revenging his loss by killing the huge creature.  Nothing less will do.  What most people who have not read the classic do not realize is how few pages of the novel are actually devoted to advancing Melville's plot (my own rough estimate is that less than half of the book's more than 600 pages do so).  The rest of the book, the portion that most often drives readers to distraction, is Melville's primer on the nuts and bolts of whaling, whaling ships and their crews, and whale anatomy. 

Melville, through the voice of his narrator, builds a strong case that those risking their lives providing a product so critical to the nation deserve much more respect and appreciation than they are accorded by the public.  He is also determined that his readers get a proper sense of the size of the creatures whalers were, under the harshest of conditions, battling for the benefit of those who took it all for granted.  Melville accomplishes both admirably.  The risks these men took with their lives on the open sea are astounding, and modern readers cannot help but be impressed by their skill and courage.

Moby-Dick has a Shakespearian quality to it, even to what at times sounds almost like stage direction inserted by the author as an aside.  This quality is most apparent in Melville's dialogue and the way he has his characters regularly speak their deepest and most private thoughts aloud.  Both the structure and the philosophical nature of the book contribute to its reputation as one of the greatest novels ever written - despite the generally terrible reception the novel received when first published. 

Bottom Line:  There is so much going on in Moby-Dick that whole books have been written about the novel.  It is, I suspect, on many more "To Be Read" lists than it is on "Read" lists, and this is understandable given its length and complexity.  Readers, however, should never permanently abandon their effort to read this classic novel.  Just the feeling of accomplishment one gets when that final page is turned is reason enough to keep Moby-Dick on the nightstand as long as it takes.

Us Against You - Fredrik Backman

Us Against You is Fredrik Backman’s sequel to Bear Town, a book about a remote Swedish town’s utter devotion to its local hockey teams (Junior and Senior). As I pointed out in my review of Bear Town both of these two books are very fragile, in the sense that even one or two key spoilers will tremendously lessen their emotional impact. For that reason, I’m going to be particularly careful not to spoil them for future readers. 

Essentially, Us Against You picks up from where Bear Town leaves off. Bear Town and the neighboring town of Hed are at each other’s throats, mainly because Hed is in the process of stealing all of Bear Town’s best young players, but the animosity and jealousy between the two towns runs much deeper than that.  Bear Town’s junior hockey team has imploded because its star player, a boy everyone believes to be destined for stardom in the NHL, has committed a crime that cannot be ignored – the kind of crime that too many young athletes blessed with superior physical ability expect to get away with because they are so important to their team. Now, opinion in Bear Town is split, and it’s not anything close to an even split. Most of the townspeople want so badly to believe the boy’s denials they pretend that they do even if they don’t. They prefer to blame the victim if, they say, there even wasa victim. And those who dare openly to express a feeling that the player is guilty will learn the hard way that there is a price to be paid in Bear Town for not being a “team player.” 

So, this is not just a war between Hed and Bear Town. Bear Town is suffering its own civil war at the same time.

Fredrik Backman

There are lots of characters in Us Against You, some of them more essential to the main plot than others – but they are all there for a reason. Backman tells the Bear Town story in episodic fashion; short, alternating glimpses of what certain characters are doing separately and together at any given moment. Some of the episodes overlap in real time and others serve to bring the action forward chronologically. The effect of seeing these characters so many times and in so many different settings is that they soon distinguish themselves from one another so clearly that even the minor characters take on lives of their own. 

Us Against You is most definitely a coming-of-age novel, and it’s a good one. But that’s not all it is. Backman explores the meaning of team sport to its fans and asks the eternal question of whether a sport like hockey is just a game to amuse its fans or if it is something more than that. Obviously, to the people of Bear Town and Hed, it’s much, much more than a game; it’s their source of town pride and - be it a good thing or a bad thing – team pride is what distinguishes the citizens of one town from the other. But when team pride becomes this tribal, bad things are going to happen. 

Bottom Line: Us Against You is one of those rare sports books filled with memorable characters ranging all the way from a twelve-year-old boy who will do whatever it takes to avenge his sixteen-year-old sister, to a female hockey coach with zero social skills, to an old woman who has been running one of the town’s few watering holes her entire life, to a hockey coach who believes he would die if he had to leave the game, to a four-year-old girl who is so hockey crazy that she runs away from pre-school in order to practice her shot, to three sisters who had to take over the role of father to their little brother, and on and on. These are just a few of the characters in this story, and I feel like I personally know every single one of them. 

Bear Town and Us Against You are two of my favorite books of 2019. They fit so seamlessly together that they remind me of binge-watching two seasons of a favorite Netflix season. Us Against You is not just for hockey fans (I’m certainly not one), and it is not entirely necessary to read Bear Town before reading Us Against You, although I would recommend that you do so. Bear Town left me angry; Us Against You left me with tears in my eyes.

Book Number 3,423