Sam Anderson is currently a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine. Formerly a book critic for New York Magazine and regular contributor to Slate, Anderson's journalism and essays have won numerous awards, including the National Magazine Award for Essays and Criticism. He lives in New York with his family.
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2019 ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE IN
NONFICTION
A NEW YORK TIMES EDITOR'S CHOICE
“[Anderson] has discovered a subject that energizes him the way a
birch-bark canoe roused John McPhee, the way a French meal stoked
M.F.K. Fisher and the way a burning Bronx fired up Jonathan Mahler…
Unlike navel-gazing yappers like Hunter S. Thompson, Anderson
doesn’t splatter himself all over the story. He never drowns out
anyone with his sly, entertaining voice. His sensibility,
sophisticated though it may be, is generous enough to stand up and
offer its seat to others… For all of the surrealism in [Franz
Kafka’s Oklahoma-set] Amerika, whose runic metaphysics helped give
rise to the adjective ‘Kafkaesque,’ the manuscript doesn’t begin to
match the genuinely American phantasmagoria of Boom Town. What’s
most surreal about Oklahoma City, as brilliantly rendered in
Anderson’s wild and gusty history, is that this city is for
real.”
—THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
“[Boom Town is a] dizzyingly pleasurable new history of Oklahoma
City. If ‘dizzyingly pleasurable’ and ‘Oklahoma City’ aren’t words
you expect to see in the same sentence, Anderson’s book wants to
convince you that the capital of America’s forty-sixth state is the
most secretly fascinating place on earth… It’s a peculiarly
concentrated locus of old American energies, creative, destructive,
and bizarre, and Anderson illuminates both the romance and the
hubris of a city that went from wild gunfights to unrestrained
freeways in a single human lifetime… Boom Town is a dazzling urban
history… Anderson writes beautifully about the human beings he
encounters, both living and dead. A minute-by-minute account of the
Oklahoma City bombing left me almost in tears… Anderson’s curious,
hilarious, and wildly erudite book vividly evokes the bonk he
describes here, as it holds together, quivers, and remakes itself
over the following century.”
—Brian Phillips, THE NEW YORKER
“If you could snap your fingers and instantly invent a city from
scratch, you’d be hard-pressed to conjure a weirder one than
Oklahoma City… This, and so much more, is the subject of Sam
Anderson’s fantastic new book, Boom Town, an enthralling,
hilarious, and unexpectedly moving biography of Oklahoma City that
already feels like a classic of its kind. Think City of Quartz if
Mike Davis was a basketball junkie (City of Courts?) or if Jane
Jacobs had co-written Blazing Saddles... [Anderson] will have
you opening your preferred travel app, idly pricing tickets to the
Sooner State."
—Jack Hamilton, SLATE
“A delightfully deep dive into ‘one of the great weirdo cities of
the world’… [Boom Town is] one of the more unexpectedly
entertaining -- and stimulating -- nonfiction romps in recent
memory. Anderson deftly weaves together history, personalities and
his own observations.”
—SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
"[Boom Town is] one of my favorite things I've read in the past
year. I think it will go down in history as one of the great pieces
of narrative nonfiction."
—ROMAN MARS, 99% Invisible
“It’s hard to believe that any biography of any American city could
be more consistently interesting, entertaining and informative than
this one."
—NPR
“In writing both idiosyncratic and unerring, this culture critic
(formerly of New York) proves that any subject, in the right hands,
can mesmerize and delight… Befitting the title, OKC is always on
the verge of triumph (oil booms, redevelopment) and disaster (oil
busts, tornadoes), a young locale more archetypal of the American
mythos than the 26 bigger cities in the country.”
—VULTURE, "8 New Books You Should Read This August"
“Boom Town serves as a guidebook to a corner of America by turns
utterly unfamiliar and easily recognizable… Anderson writes about
Oklahoma City with zeal and devotion, his rollicking prose
perfectly suited to Oklahoma City’s boom mentality. He expertly
deploys singular characters to illustrate the city’s strangeness…
The city demands attention.”
—WALL STREET JOURNAL
“Boom Town [is a] nuanced, immersive portrait of Oklahoma City…
This is the strength, the unlikely triumph, of Boom Town, which
takes a city almost universally overlooked and turns it into a
metaphor for, well, everything.”
—THE WASHINGTON POST
“A bonkers, kitchen-sink cultural history of Oklahoma City, with
the local Thunder’s would-be dynasty as its driving soul.”
—NEW YORK TIMES
“[Anderson sets] a winning course in his biography of Oklahoma’s
capital city. What could have easily devolved into a bone-dry
academic text instead surfaces as an animated Plains epic that
complicates the popular notion of a supposedly stale place… Every
city, every town, has an epic tale, but it can be hard to locate a
through line, the tissue connecting every major figure, historical
event, and local affair. Writers and critics sometimes talk of
place as a character itself, referring to some hazy sense that
setting plays a crucial role in a story. In Boom Town, that
character is squarely in the crosshairs… I haven’t read a
nonfiction book that has made me yearn so strongly to visit an
American city since John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good
and Evil.”
—THE ATLANTIC
“[Anderson] is a gifted sports writer who finds high drama not only
in the play-by-play narratives of individual games, but in the
off-court dynamics as well… [Anderson] empathizes with and loves
Oklahoma City for all of its weirdness. He doesn’t slum with pity
or rage. But he is at his best describing farces and historical
tragedies in sober, simile-rich prose.”
—LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS
“The decorated journalist Sam Anderson, a staff writer at The New
York Times Magazine, has set out to fill a yawning gap in the
American popular imagination: our tendency to ignore the nation’s
27th-largest metropolis, Oklahoma City. Anderson’s rollicking
narrative is woven from two threads —the vicissitudes of the city’s
NBA team, the Oklahoma City Thunder, and the city’s boom-and-bust
history… Anderson runs wild with this material.”
—THE MILLIONS
“Every city should be so lucky as to have a Sam Anderson in its
corner. In the often dull genre of urban biographies, Boom Town is
a rollicking, engaging, and occasionally hilarious account of the
past and future of Oklahoma City… Anderson and Boom Town show us
how to see a city with fresh eyes.”
—PLANETIZEN (Top 10 Urban Planning Books of 2018)
“Boom Town is filled with so many crazy, hilarious tales that it
will cause most readers to second guess long held assumptions.
Surprises are found throughout Anderson’s tales, even for those who
consider themselves most informed about Oklahoma City. Boom Town,
however, aspires for a national audience. Putting aside civic pride
and obvious bias, this well written book deserves that audience and
may be the key to helping those outside of Oklahoma realize its
capital city is far more colorful, unpredictable, dangerous and fun
than is represented by its reputation of being ‘nice.’ Add Boom
Town to your collection for the entertainment; appreciate it
afterward for the education.”
—THE OKLAHOMAN
“Maybe you didn’t know that Oklahoma City was the key to
everything. But it is. Boom Town is a bone-shaking thrill ride
through civic history.”
—NICHOLSON BAKER
"A wild ride of a book that goes from fascinating to hilarious to
hair-raising to powerfully moving, sometimes in the space of just a
few pages. With clear-eyed affection and consummate skill, Anderson
shows us an amazing American place wherein we recognize
ourselves."
—IAN FRAZIER
"No one—no one—writes like Sam Anderson: so vividly, so stylishly,
so smartly, so weirdly, so funnily. By the time I’d finished this
doozy of a book, he had me asking: Oklahoma City, where have you
been all my life?"
—ANNE FADIMAN
“In Boom Town, Sam Anderson shrewdly anatomizes the deep
strangeness of Oklahoma City—its messy history of hope,
self-subversion, and occasional wretched luck—and of its citizens’
grandiose belief in their capacity for renewal and
greatness. The result, a yarn that deftly navigates between
then and now, brims with wit, bright color, relentless reporting,
and, most admirably, empathy.”
—MARK SINGER
“Sam Anderson is a visionary artist who sees what others can’t;
he’s a master wordsmith who creates beauty and light from confusion
and plunging darkness; he's our tour guide to a better tomorrow
because he understands a complex and foundational history that is
our launching pad to new and unexplored universes.”
—BILL WALTON
“This book offers [Anderson’s] take on the histories of both [the
Oklahoma City Thunder and its boom or bust hometown], rendered
through research, copious interviews, and a sharp eye for the
quirky. Written with style and amazingly good humor, considering
the hopes blooming and dashed nature of both city and team, this
should please a wide range of readers, from basketball fans to
historians to city planners.”
—LIBRARY JOURNAL (starred)
“A rollicking, kaleidoscopic chronicle of America’s 27th-largest
city… Anderson’s lively and empathetic saga captures the outsize
ambitions, provincial realities, and vibrant history of a
quintessentially American city.”
—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
“An irreverent look at one of the nation's quirkier cities… [Boom
Town is] a rollicking [and] entertaining history of a city that,
for all its booms and busts, is never boring.”
—KIRKUS REVIEWS
“[Anderson’s] first book, Boom Town, is a hilarious history and
drive-through study of this Midwestern city born of bedlam and
ambition… Anderson digs relentlessly into the state capital’s
boom-and-bust history. Illustrated with archival photos, his story
jumps between top-flight sportswriting and more lighthearted and
diverse chapters on the idiosyncrasies of OKC.”
—SHELF AWARENESS
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