Fracking: review of Michael Patrick Smith's novel "The Good Hand" in The Atlantic

 The Atlantic offers a very interesting review of Michael Patrick F. Smith's novel "The Good Hand: A Memoir of Work, Brotherhood, and Transformation in an American Boomtown" about his experiences on a drilling field in Williston.

"Two new books take us there. In The Good Hand: A Memoir of Work, Brotherhood, and Transformation in an American Boomtown, Michael Patrick F. Smith finds his checking account and personal demons intertwined with the oil industry. At the height of the Bakken Formation oil boom, in 2013, Smith left Brooklyn seeking what he imagined would be challenging but lucrative work in the oil fields. A playwright and musician raised amid poverty and domestic abuse in rural Maryland, he never quite felt at home in gentrified Brooklyn or at his Midtown Manhattan office job that paid the bills. This identity crisis, combined with a penchant for self-punishment previously pursued through drugs and sex, sent him west to see whether he might finally make a man of himself at 36.

What he found in the now-infamous boomtown of Williston, North Dakota, was a cast of characters with even rougher pasts than his own. Smith’s memoir is about these men, who showed up from across the country and beyond to risk their lives on a windswept plain where the temperature might be 38 degrees below zero and the pay might be $20 an hour."

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/05/the-human-side-of-fracking/618401/