Sam AndersonRezensionen

I won an ARC in a GOODREADS giveaway!

If I call it the third best non-fiction book I've read in the last year, that's still high praise, indeed. Informative, interesting, and almost maddeningly well-written, it is the sort of book that gives you a delightful tour of territory that you thought you couldn't care less about, and even more weirdly, kind of makes me want to go to Oklahoma. I mean, what the heck is that?

did i care about OKC before reading this book? no. do i care about OKC after reading this book? no. BUT Sam Anderson made OKC's history very interesting to learn about. this was an entertaining, fast paced book. and i learned a lot which i know is the point of a facts book, but it was super enjoyable. #keepOKCweird

This is narrative non-fiction at its best. Anderson does such a wonderful job of painting the city and its people, and most notably their mentality, that I was completely immersed by the breadth and depth of this neglected city's culture and history. He has managed to make the city feel like a literary character.

I received a copy of this book free from the publisher for review.

This book has an ugly dustjacket. And that's about all the criticism I can come up with. The book is a history of Oklahoma City, told by interweaving several strands from history with an account of the city's attainment of its long-held dream to become a major league sports town by obtaining the former Seattle NBA franchise and the team's subsequent misadventures. This strand alternates with a fairly linear account of the city's passage from its chaotic land run origins, through an urban renewal from Hell fiasco in the years after WWII, to its turn-of-the-century attempt to reinvent itself as a sophisticated hipster refuge. Through it all, we proceed back and forth to seeing this history and life there today through the prism of such locals as end-of-the-bench basketball player Daniel Orton, TV weathercasting celebrity Gary England, rock star Wayne Coyne, OKC's Robert Moses, Stanley Draper, and two David Paynes--the original land run mover-and-shaker and his namesake, a stormchaser of today.

This is all compulsively readable and I often had difficulty putting it down. His feel for Oklahoma City is, overall, very good. He gets one thing wrong, though, and it's a pretty big thing: he equates OKC's downtown with life in the place as a whole. Yes, downtown was a moonscape during the seventies and eighties, and that wasn't a good thing. But life went on, pretty well, around the metro area. Yes, I wish that Jane Jacobs were in charge of America's city planning. Until that happens, though, entertainment and commercial life in general are going to follow the population and the money. Hence, those features of urban life began migrating northwestward, to the Northwest Expressway during the sixties, and further out to the Memorial Road corridor later, around the turn of the century. Otherwise, a great and memorable book, superbly written, and a joy to read.½

A terrific tale of the craziness of Oklahoma City, its history and its basketball team.

A wonderful lbook, Anderson is a great basketball writer (Thunder) and is also great at nature (tornadoes) ss well as a deep rooted history of cities.Well balaanced

BOOMTOWN by Sam Anderson provides a vivid, unique and entertaining view of the history of Oklahoma City, from the Land Run that haphazardly created this one-of-a-kind city, all the way to the OKC Thunder, which brought much needed attention to a city who seemed to have lost it's identity recently.
Anderson balanced present and past stories of Oklahoma City and all the time showed the boom (and eventual bust) approach to all things. That through line was felt in well researched stories of the creation and growth of the city and also through the more recent chapters about the NBA Thunder team and Wanye Coyne, lead signer of the band The Flaming Lips, amongst others. For a reader like me who hasn't been to central US much and never to Oklahoma, Anderson does an excellent of of creating a desire for me to visit, in spite of Anderson's very clear description of the awful weather, the recent rise in earthquakes, and the general isolation from much of the rest of the US that Oklahoma City feels daily. That's one of the reasons that Anderson's book is so good, his writing draws you into a very unconventional and often despressing city because it's clear that Anderson has an strong affinity for the city and wants his readers to as well.
Oklahoma City is like no other major city in the US; it's creation, it's mentality, it's weather beaten history. Sam Anderson's BOOMTOWN paints a clear and realistic picture of Oklahoma City, warts and all. Any reader interesting in finding out about such a rare and wonderful city Oklahoma City reall is would enjoy this book.
Thank you to Crown Publishing, Sam Anderson, and Netgalley for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review!