This is a documentary about the oil book in North Dakota and its impact on local residents. Rao introduces a lot of interesting characters and the way she narrates their stories is very much like a memoir. I really appreciated how her writing draws you in and places you on the scene with the people she's telling you about. You know them. You follow their stories and you have a difficult time not feeling invested in them. The book is a little over 330 pages, but it felt so long. Perhaps it's the subject matter that made it more tedious to read. *ARC provided by the publisher in exchange for my honest review.

The Great American Outpost is a scattershot memoir of the North Dakota fracking oil boom and its impact on local residents.

In 2011, the first horizontal fracking oil well was drilled in North Dakota. What followed totally changed the laid back farming vibe of the state. Out-of-state workers flooded the area in search of unskilled and truck driving jobs paying upwards of $150,000 a year. Many were criminals, drunks and/or avoiding their child support orders. The jails were so full they had to take criminals to Montana to house them. With so many large trucks on the road, locals were dying regularly in traffic accidents. Enterprising locals upped their food prices over 100%. Housing was scarce. One English con man scammed international investors with a resident hotel Ponzi scheme.

While somewhat interesting, the Great American Outpost didn’t hold my interest throughout. It needed some editing to mine a coherent plot from its episodic stories of North Dakota’s oil rush. 3 stars.

Thanks to the publisher, Public Affairs/Perseus Books, and NetGalley for an advanced copy.

In this stunning masterpiece debut, Great American Outpost: Dreamers, Mavericks, and The Making of an Oil Frontier author-journalist for the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Maya Rao, tells the extraordinary story of the North Dakota Bakken Oil Boom (2010-2015) that centered in the city of Williston, N.D. At the peak of the boom, the area filled with thousands of new arrivals, and has often been compared to the 1849 San Francisco Gold Rush. The Dakota badlands in the Bakken formation contain the largest oil reserves in the U.S. after Texas.

With the price of oil selling for $100.00 a barrel, oil fracking was used to extract oil from the bowels of the earth, each frack was serviced by one to five million gallons of water. Fresh water was hauled in and salt toxin water hauled out. About 2,300 truck-loads were required to service each operating oil well. Unfortunately, investigators found cases of illegal waste water and other forms of disposal which was forbidden by state and federal regulations. Corporate oil companies were fined, fees were paid etc. However, polluted portions of the land were inhabitable and destroyed for future generations.

Large semi’s and industrial trucks clogged Hwy 85 through Williston, and traffic accidents resulting in many deaths were common. The entire area was changing so rapidly with all kinds of construction from man-camps, RV and mobile home parks, strip malls, taverns/bars, gas with service stations and every form of business to accommodate the influx of people arriving from around the globe. All forms of services, food and lodging were offered at exorbitant costs. With the unrelenting sub-zero winter temperatures, snow, the wind-chill factor of the badlands, life was brutal for those living in their cars or small trailers unable to afford basic shelter.

At the height of the boom, the urban research and civil engineering staff were unable to accurately map population growth. Maya was stunned at the level of criminal activity. A charming British con-man disappeared with a fortune stolen from investors from Singapore and other locations abroad; calls went unanswered, investigative authorities were unable to trace or find him. A well regarded business woman was arrested sent to prison for operating drug ring based out of multiple locations and states.

Maya rode in a tanker, the driver offered to teach her to drive a truck and get her CDL (Commercial Driver’s License) so she could get a land a well-paying job at about $80,000 per year. The experienced oil field workers arrived from Texas and Oklahoma: they were “roughnecks” “wildcatters” “tool pushers” “drillers”-- the work was demanding, dangerous and very hard. Most of the men were single, respectable and responsible fatherhood was typically measured by child-support payments of sons and daughters the men seldom heard from or didn’t know.

In 2015, with a global surplus of oil, the barrels of crude oil prices began a rapid decline. Corporate oil companies were turning towards pipelines over using truck transport. This would raise serious environmental concerns that are still being addressed. Workers began leaving Williston as quickly as they had arrived. This culturally outstanding work accurately portrays a boom and bust cycle of an all-American town, events and people daring enough to risk everything they had for a better way of life. ** With much appreciation and thanks to Hachette Book Group via NetGalley for the DDC for the purpose of review.

This was fascinating! Maya Rao embeds in the Bakken from 2014-2016 to report on the oil boom. She befriends everyone from truck drivers, oil rig workers, oil executives, and shady businessmen. Everyone looking to strike it rich. She documents the rise and fall of the oil industry as only an insider can. People who arrived early to the boom, were able to get astronomical salaries only to lose it all a short while later. She has a great talent for telling their stories and making the reader understand their side of things. It was amazing to me the things she was able to get people to talk about. Definitely a worthwhile read. Thank you to NetGalley for providing an ARC for review.

I've spent almost my entire life in southwestern North Dakota, only a few hours away from the epicenter of the recent oil boom in the Bakken. And even down here on the fringes of the boom, it's hard to believe how much has changed in such a short period of time.

Maya Rao spent two years in the Bakken, investigating these changes, talking to farmers and ranchers, oil workers from around the world, oil executives, and government officials. Rao has written a book that brings to light how complicated this boom has been for everyone involved, while keeping an open mind and remaining neutral. The boom was romanticized, then villainized by everyone who has survived it (depending on which side you're on, of course). Rao is unbiased in her reporting of the issues, making this a perfect read for anyone who is interested in learning what life was and is really like in the Bakken. As someone who lives on the very edge of the oil activity, it gave me a much more clear idea of what happened during the boom/bust to my neighbors to the North. It's not as clear cut as some would believe, and Rao does an excellent job showing both sides of the story. This is a great book for anyone who is interested in learning about the largest oil boom in modern history, told by the people who lived it.

One could travel there by taking the interstate all the way across North Dakota, then going up Highway 85, which formed the backbone of the oilfield and ran 1,479 miles from El Paso to the Canadian border. But to really understand the place, a traveler ought to make a series of northern and westerly turns from Jamestown and its iconic buffalo sculpture, into long and green hollows of feral quiet that ran hundreds of miles. Get out in some smudge of a town like Harvey to fill the tank again - shiver in the eyes of stillness that beamed over that endless expanse - retreat to the car as if to escape forces that would pull a human interloper into the fissures of the earth. Remember this upon arriving at the western flank of the state, where trucks and rigs and men ran roughshod and nature was the trespasser.

Between 2014 and 2016, Minneapolis Star Tribune reporter Maya Rao immersed herself in the new American oil boom, living and observing life and the changes in the Bakken oilfields of North Dakota. She even worked as a cashier at a truck stop, this being one of the central locations for everyday commerce and connection in the sparse landscape of the Bakken. It's a strange new frontier environment, where rents have skyrocketed, cashiers have to be paid a minimum of $14 an hour if there's any hope of keeping them around and even then, turnover thanks to richer prospects is high, and a new breed of opportunistic fortune-seekers, some with honest intentions and others either running from dark pasts or with shadowy plans forming, flock in droves.

The product of this immersion is a narrative nonfiction account drawing on interviews and experiences had with the myriad characters she lived, worked with, or got to know, coupled with her sharp observations, detailed descriptions of life and the oddities particular to the area, and reporting on the scandals and crimes to emerge from this new wild (mid)west. It draws a down-on-their-luck type, with the rumor that there's $17,000 a month to be made drilling oil. Along with that kind of money comes either shrewd entrepreneurial types or unscrupulous ones.

These include the strippers there to entertain bored, overworked men in an environment of very few women, to straight up conners like Larry Hogan, a Brit running a Ponzi scheme: "As complaints mounted, the Securities and Exchange Commission sued the company for running a Ponzi scheme. It was one of the largest securities fraud cases the SEC prosecuted in connection with America's modern fracking boom. Investigators found the bank accounts drained. Nine hundred and eighty investors from sixty-six countries lost $62 million."

I went into this knowing next to nothing and it all just seemed so surreal, also thanks in part to Rao's storytelling style. She plays up the little things, the personal elements that make for a good story, and a place that's easy to conjure up in your mind's eye thanks to her attention to detail. One little thing I absolutely loved was how she focused on food - what she ate, hurriedly and often in the cab of a tanker truck, what the rich were cooking, the artery-clogging fried meals that oil workers were fed as high calorie specials at truck stops and bars - it might sound silly, but this was my favorite part of the book.

I found little more comfort than when the lights of a truck stop were shining far ahead like a lodestar. Transience turns so many of the old routines into open questions - where to sleep? to eat? to shower? to think? - and the American truck stop bundles all the answers to life into one massive building. Comfort is in the generic: a sad sack song from the eighties playing over the speaker, pizza and chicken fingers from the freezer, coffee machines and packets of French vanilla creamer.

It's just one little example, also partially explaining her draw to the truck stop where she worked as well. I love this kind of writing. Either consciously or subconsciously she juxtaposes the food served to or purchased by the oil workers, like the aforementioned and the high-fat, high-calories heart attack specials at truck stops meant to provide sustenance and energy for a longer time, with the ritzy food served at dinner parties by the region's profiteering rich.

She also captures something of the loneliness and desolation inherent to this region and to the nature of the work - long hours, few women, isolated landscapes.

The attention to detail is a wonderful aspect of this book, and what gives readers unfamiliar with the region a clear vision of the place and the strange circumstances.

"People think New York's fast-paced...get in line," said one customer. "You want fast, it's fast around here." North Dakota produced more oil than any state except Texas, but it was second to none in hustle and spirit.

Rao often references history or literature of the Gold Rush, comparing that historical westward surge with this modern one, and the parallels are certainly fascinating.

The book is written in a narrative nonfiction style, but with a heavy dose of the area's economics mixed in. This is to be expected, but some of it detracted from the stories for me. Which may be on me - I was interested in the stories of the larger-than-life characters and bizarre circumstances, but for these to exist, there had to be the special economics of the oilfield and the economy grown around it. I just found my attention wandering significantly during sections that focused heavily on this, or the connected hedge funds and investments, topics like this.

But elsewhere, Rao has a great talent for storytelling and describing the region and the feeling it conveys so strongly.

I had a misguided tendency in the Bakken of using mainstream logic instead of anticipating total absurdity.

Equal parts character study in absurdity and economy, it's surely the best study of America's 21st century oil boom. It just wasn't quite what I needed to draw me in to a subject that I didn't have previous interest or knowledge in.

Well written inside view of the crazy side of American capitalism. Rao introduces a rogues gallery of characters along with hard working folks focused on trying to get ahead. she covers the full arc of the Bakken from beginning of the boom to bust to semi settled.

A job well done or well written. It shows you the new boom towns of America and dives into the characters that populate them. Great job

Rents for apartments on par with San Francisco out in the far northwest of Dakota. A local minimum wage needs to be at least $14 to keep up with the amount of money that is flowing around. People who arrive from around the country with little more than the shirts on their backs quickly finding jobs that let them make six figures, yet forced to live in vans or in crowded apartments a la freshly graduated college students. Conmen of all shapes and sizes converging together into some of the northernmost reaches of the upper midwest to carry out scams of all sorts in order to try and get a piece of the pie.

These are only a few examples from a world of literally life-threatening daily work, cutthroat greed, rural communities in chaos, wild breakneck boom, and heartbreaking bust that are so thoroughly-documented in this work by Maya Rao. At one point, a man under investigation from the SEC, a woman soon to be busted for a multi-state drug ring, and a man wrapped up in a massive waste-dumping scandal are all eating dinner together at a party in a swanky new housing development. Yet because Rao's documentation of all the absurdities of life around the Bakken Formation at the the height of the rush is so thorough, this scene doesn't feel even half as outrageous in the context of the book as it sounds here.

"Great American Outpost" is a magnificent work of modern-day journalistic writing that is exhaustive in coverage of its topic. Thanks to Rao's hard work, you are going to be incredibly hard-pressed to find a more intimate look at life in the oil fields of North Dakota.