The Bakken -- And The Men -- April 10, 2021

From the blog, February 28, 2021:

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.

Now, today April 10, 2021, a reader sent me this, from today's edition of The NY Post:

Everyone seemed to have a violent relationship with their father, and almost everyone had a job in the oil fields or was looking for one, Smith recounts in his new book, “The Good Hand: A Memoir of Work, Brotherhood, and Transformation in an American Boomtown” (Viking), out now. They came from across the country, from states like Montana, Idaho, Washington, Tennessee, California, Texas and Florida, to make their fortunes in the oil boom.

Williston sits near the center of the Bakken Formation, “a subsurface rock unit bigger than the state of California,” Smith writes, “and one of the largest contiguous deposits of oil and gas on the planet.”

In 2008, as the US economy was in shambles and the housing market collapsed, Williston’s oil boom was just beginning, with prices peaking at $145 a barrel.