A reader brought this book to my attention: The Good Hand: A Memoir of Work, Brotherhood, and Transformation in an American Boomtown, Michael Patrick F. Smith, c. (released), February 16, 2021, 464 pages.
It's currently the #1 book over at Amazon in "Fossil Fuels."
From the LA Times, reviewed/published yesterday, February 27, 2021:
In the summer of 2012, Michael Patrick F. Smith read an article in Men’s Journal about the Bakken oil fields in North Dakota. At the time, he was working a white-collar job in lower Manhattan, living in Brooklyn, engaging in the drug- and alcohol-soaked bacchanal of “postadolescent” life available to any steadily employed white man in New York City. He was, it should come as no surprise, bored. So he sublet the apartment, bought a Chevy and drove to the site of the biggest oil boom in a century.
The Good Hand is in part a meditation on how central oil is to our lives, but it is just as much about the gruesome work of actually extracting that oil. Why the Bakken? “Advances in drilling technology — horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing — have turned this massive though previously unrecoverable shale deposit into a river of sweet crude grease.” The influx of workers was like a “modern Grapes of Wrath,” Smith writes. “Desperate for bodies to work the rigs,” he explains, “North Dakota’s oil field companies gained a reputation for offering good pay, benefits, signing bonuses, per diems, and housing to any dude who could make the trek to town and swing a hammer when he got there.” Smith arrives with $3,000 in cash and $2,500 in credit. Can he swing a hammer?
This book could have been as unsurprising as the privileged life Smith left behind. Man is bored, does hard thing, emerges with lessons. What makes Smith’s book matter is the wealth of world-building detail, as well as the journey through pain both physical and psychological.
The first thing Smith has to do is find a place to live — a surprising obstacle from the start. Rents in northwest North Dakota are higher than Manhattan’s. Then he has to find a job. At a library, “Big-boned white men sit alone at scattered tables like lonesome rhinoceroses, poring over job applications and hunting-and-pecking online forms.” Then he has to survive. “A few years of felon-friendly, no-questions-asked hiring by oil companies has gifted Williston, North Dakota, with the highest concentration of rapists and child molesters in the world.”
After spending 10 nights in his Chevy, Smith locates a mattress for rent on the floor of a flophouse. Upstairs live a woman and her son, both with Tourette’s syndrome. The Jamaicans in another bedroom hide out from the racism rampant in the camp. A crew of drunks and psychopaths shares the cramped townhouse. Fights are common.
“I lived among them like a friendly ghost,” Smith says, with characteristically poetic understatement. Life in the flop is like jail — “killing time, watching TV, maybe reading, trying to not let the other guys get on your nerves too bad. So you can get back to sleep. So you can wake up. So you can go back to work.”
Work: the simplicity of getting it and then trying not to die if you screw up. Or kill someone else. Or both. Smith’s triumph in securing the oil job is fleeting. The work really is that hard and that dangerous. “Even after lunch,” he writes, “my stomach feels empty and alert as if, instead of a ham sandwich, I had swallowed an exclamation point.”
And more at the link.
I haven't bought it yet.
More from the linked review:
There are about 600 chapters in this book. All are quite short. They jump around chronologically with astonishing success. From the first time Smith fits hooks and chains under a heavy piece of equipment to his sad attempts to make friends, from his first glimmers of self-doubt to his what-was-I-thinking agonies, what carries us along is imagery ripped from There Will Be Blood and replanted in striking prose.
Most interesting. Over at Amazon.com, one-hundred percent of the reviews gave the book five stars on a rating scale of one to five. I don't think I've ever seen that before. Even if only his friends and family wrote the reviews, certainly there would be some non-family reviewer who might not be as generous. Ten out of ten perfect ratings is suspect, but then I assume a very particular audience would read this book.
The reviews look genuine, based on the text. (Except for one that just says Hi Mike. but that's one out of nine.)
ReplyDeleteDoesn't look like a family/friend spam job. Just looks like people that liked the book. I still am surprised there were no thoughtful four star or three star reviews.
Generally speaking, a book with a narrow readership, which this one would have (a very small readership), generally has no reviews.
DeleteI remember years ago, a very close friend of mine published a book that was sold on Amazon. It, too, would have had a very narrow readership. There were three reviews: the author's spouse; my review; and a review from another family member.
It doesn't matter to me one way or the other, but this writer would have had a lot of NYC friends.
There are now eleven reviews. Amazon identifies if any of the reviewers are "verified purchasers." Only the first four are verified purchases. The eleventh reviewer was a four-star review.
It was only released on February 16, and by the end of February it already had ten reviews.
The eleventh review, four stars, does not show up at the site.
Deletehttps://www.amazon.com/Good-Hand-Brotherhood-Transformation-American/product-reviews/1984881515/ref=cm_cr_unknown?ie=UTF8&reviewerType=all_reviews&filterByStar=four_star&pageNumber=1
Makes sense. They were probably canvassed. All that said, at least they were thoughtful reviews. Usually with this sort of canvassing, you can tell that people haven't read the book. Vague statements...you can just tell. Didn't get that vibe.
DeleteThe four star is a "rating", not a review. I guess they have that now.
I missed that, thank you. Simply a rating and not a review.
Delete