A brilliant, kaleidoscopic narrative of Oklahoma City—a great American story of civics, basketball, and destiny, from award-winning journalist Sam Anderson NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • NPR • Chicago Tribune • San Francisco Chronicle • The Economist • Deadspin Oklahoma City was born from chaos. It was founded in a bizarre but momentous “Land Run” in 1889, when thousands of people lined up along the borders of Oklahoma Territory and rushed in at noon to stake their claims. Since then, it has been a city torn between the wild energy that drives its outsized ambitions, and the forces of order that seek sustainable progress. Nowhere was this dynamic better realized than in the drama of the Oklahoma City Thunder basketball team’s 2012-13 season, when the Thunder’s brilliant general manager, Sam Presti, ignited a firestorm by trading future superstar James Harden just days before the first game. Presti’s all-in gamble on “the Process”—the patient, methodical management style that dictated the trade as the team’s best hope for long-term greatness—kicked off a pivotal year in the city’s history, one that would include pitched battles over urban planning, a series of cataclysmic tornadoes, and the frenzied hope that an NBA championship might finally deliver the glory of which the city had always dreamed. Boom Town announces the arrival of an exciting literary voice. Sam Anderson, former book critic for New York magazine and now a staff writer at the New York Times magazine, unfolds an idiosyncratic mix of American history, sports reporting, urban studies, gonzo memoir, and much more to tell the strange but compelling story of an American city whose unique mix of geography and history make it a fascinating microcosm of the democratic experiment. Filled with characters ranging from NBA superstars Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook; to Flaming Lips oddball frontman Wayne Coyne; to legendary Great Plains meteorologist Gary England; to Stanley Draper, Oklahoma City's would-be Robert Moses; to civil rights activist Clara Luper; to the citizens and public servants who survived the notorious 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah federal building, Boom Town offers a remarkable look at the urban tapestry woven from control and chaos, sports and civics.

The town of White Oaks, New Mexico Territory, was born in 1879 when prospectors discovered gold at nearby Baxter Mountain. In Gold-Mining Boomtown, Roberta Key Haldane offers an intimate portrait of the southeastern New Mexico community by profiling more than forty families and individuals who made their homes there during its heyday. Today, fewer than a hundred people live in White Oaks. Its frontier incarnation, located a scant twenty-eight miles from the notorious Lincoln, is remembered largely because of its association with famous westerners. Billy the Kid and his gang were familiar visitors to the town. When a popular deputy was gunned down in 1880, the citizens resolved to rid their community of outlaws. Pat Garrett, running for sheriff of Lincoln County, was soon campaigning in White Oaks. But there was more to the town than gold mining and frontier violence. In addition to outlaws, lawmen, and miners, Haldane introduces readers to ranchers, doctors, saloonkeepers, and stagecoach owners. José Aguayo, a lawyer from an old Spanish family, defended Billy the Kid, survived the Lincoln County War, and moved to the White Oaks vicinity in 1890, where his family became famous for the goat cheese they sold to the town’s elite. Readers also meet a New England sea captain and his wife (a Samoan princess, no less), a black entrepreneur, Chinese miners, the “Cattle Queen of New Mexico,” and an undertaker with an international criminal past. The White Oaks that Haldane uncovers—and depicts with lively prose and more than 250 photographs—is a microcosm of the Old West in its diversity and evolution from mining camp to thriving burg to the near–ghost town it is today. Anyone interested in the history of the Southwest will enjoy this richly detailed account.

"Fort Benning's history tells the story of the US infantry. For most of a century, Fort Benning's infantry school has graduated the soldiers who lead as well as the fighting foot soldiers in the dirt and mud. Founded on farm land in Georgia, it has been one of the US Army's premier installations from the days of the Doughboys to a more modern era where Rangers proudly wear their Ranger berets." "Fort Benning's long history has produced an impressive alumni list. Eisenhower coached its football team. Marshall rewrote the curriculum. Patton pushed men to prepare for battle. Bradley organized its Officer Candidate School, a source for men of rank in World War II. Powell and Schwarzkopf were honor graduates, as were Eaton and Freakley and other heroes from the sands of Iraq." "Fort Benning trained soldiers in the art of the bayonet. It prepared them to jump out of airplanes. It discovered the mobility and power of helicopters. It honed the technology of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle. It has set the table for war in the trenches, war on the ground, war in the air, and war in the desert. Infantry has led the way and so has Fort Benning. It truly is the Home of the Infantry."--BOOK JACKET.

Investigating the personal stories behind the headquarters of the Wal-Mart empire, this examination focuses on the growth of Bentonville, Arkansas--a microcosm of America's social, political, and cultural shift. Numerous personalities are interviewed, including a multimillionaire Palestinian refugee who arrived penniless and is now dedicated to building a synagogue, a Mexican mother of three who was fired after injuring herself on the job, a black executive hired to diversify Wal-Mart whose arrival coincided with a KKK rally, and a Hindu father concerned about interracial dating. In documenting these citizens' stories, this account reveals the challenges and issues facing those who compose this and other "boom towns"--where demographics, the economy, and immigration and migration patterns are continually in flux. In shedding light on these important and timely anecdotes of America's changing rural and suburban landscape, this exploration provides an entertaining and intimate chronicle of the different ethnicities, races, and religions as well as their ongoing struggles to adapt. Emerging as subtle sociology combined with drama and humanity, this overview illustrates the imperceptible and occasionally unpredictable movements that affect the nonmetropolitan environment of the United States.

Recent work on rent and rentierism has offered a distinctive and fresh approach to understanding and explaining contemporary capitalism. Drawing on political economy, economics, geography and sociology, this research has brought together distinct theoretical traditions in original and fertile ways to reshape the study of issues related to class, political-economic change and environmental challenges. This book critically engages with these theoretical resources to analyse and evaluate economies in the Global North and South. It offers historical, theoretical and empirical accounts of rentierism, making important cross-disciplinary and global connections. Its four parts address global rentier capitalism under the headings of historical lessons, theoretical developments and empirical studies of rentierism in the Global North and South. It will be the first book of its kind to offer a global account of rentier capitalism. It will be of immense interest to readers in economics, political economy, sociology, geography and development studies.

A teenage girl goes missing. When Hal, an intellectually disabled farmhand, returns from a hunting trip with a flimsy story about the blood in his truck and a dent near the headlight, Alma Costagan and her husband are forced to confront what Hal might be capable of.