BOOM TOWN: The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City, Its Chaotic Founding, Its Apocalyptic Weather, Its Purloined Basketball Team, and the Dream of Becoming a World-class Metropolis
Nonfiction
Bouncing between boom and bust
BOOM TOWN:
The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City, Its Chaotic Founding, Its Apocalyptic Weather, Its Purloined Basketball Team, and the Dream of Becoming a World-class Metropolis
By Sam Anderson
448 pp. Crown
The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City, Its Chaotic Founding, Its Apocalyptic Weather, Its Purloined Basketball Team, and the Dream of Becoming a World-class Metropolis
By Sam Anderson
448 pp. Crown
Reviewed by Sarah Corbett Morgan
I kept looking at this book and thinking, Nah, I don’t want to read about Oklahoma City and what do I know or care about professional basketball? But something kept making me look at it again. The cover perhaps? Whatever, I was gobsmacked; Boom Town is one of the best books I’ve read in a long time. It’s been described by other reviewers as brilliant and kaleidoscopic. Yes and yes.
The book is indeed about Oklahoma City, the city that desperately wants to be world class but fails with regularity. Their airport, for example, is named for their native son, humorist, newspaper columnist, and social commentator, Will Rogers. Will Rogers World Airport, this grandiose title even though no international flights originate from or arrive there.
The author and award-winning journalist, Sam Anderson, has a delicious sense of humor. He bounces back and forth between Oklahoma City (OKC) history; a grab bag of odd local characters, both living and dead; and the pride of the city, the basketball team they stole from Seattle, the Thunder (formerly known as the SuperSonics).
The Thunder appropriation, or outright theft, is a hilarious part of the book and makes me understand more clearly how Oklahoman and former EPA head under the current administration, Scott Pruitt, could be such a small-time grafter. His Moisturegate affair, it seems, is standard operating procedure for at least some OKC politicians.
As Anderson points out, most cities can’t name the day they were founded, their city-ness developing naturally and organically over time. But OKC can name the day, and even the hour (noon), when a gun was fired into the blue skies overhead sending thousands hurtling by oxcart, wagon, horse, and on foot to claim what they could of what would become OKC. If you think there might have been some confusion in this plan, you would be right. It took years and more than a few fights, both legal and physical, to iron out who owned what.
From its birth onward, OKC worried about its standing in the world. Tulsa was a competitive threat, so was Houston. To wrest the state capital title away from Tulsa, OKC decided to get bigger. They began what Anderson describes as the Annexation Period, eventually expanding its city boundaries to 607 square miles, even though the population today is only around 600,000. That’s a lot of land per capita.
One of my favorite people in this book is the famed weatherman Gary England of KWTV, who during his lengthy career saw Oklahomans through devastating tornadoes with his calm and reassuring voice. He helped create the First Warning System we see on TV today, and could tell when a bad one was coming just by smelling the air. It smells like fish.
Anderson writes about the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building bombing in such detail that I felt I was onsite. I could feel the blast and smell the fertilizer. The impact of that tragedy affected everyone in Oklahoma City, and Thunder management makes sure each new player joining the team tours the site, the museum, and monument to the 168 lives lost.
Some of the book, like the above, is solemn, some humorous, but all of it creates a wonderful, yes, kaleidoscopic and deep understanding of one of the ten largest cities—at least by land mass—in the United States, a city that is ever bouncing between boom and bust.
I kept looking at this book and thinking, Nah, I don’t want to read about Oklahoma City and what do I know or care about professional basketball? But something kept making me look at it again. The cover perhaps? Whatever, I was gobsmacked; Boom Town is one of the best books I’ve read in a long time. It’s been described by other reviewers as brilliant and kaleidoscopic. Yes and yes.
The book is indeed about Oklahoma City, the city that desperately wants to be world class but fails with regularity. Their airport, for example, is named for their native son, humorist, newspaper columnist, and social commentator, Will Rogers. Will Rogers World Airport, this grandiose title even though no international flights originate from or arrive there.
The author and award-winning journalist, Sam Anderson, has a delicious sense of humor. He bounces back and forth between Oklahoma City (OKC) history; a grab bag of odd local characters, both living and dead; and the pride of the city, the basketball team they stole from Seattle, the Thunder (formerly known as the SuperSonics).
The Thunder appropriation, or outright theft, is a hilarious part of the book and makes me understand more clearly how Oklahoman and former EPA head under the current administration, Scott Pruitt, could be such a small-time grafter. His Moisturegate affair, it seems, is standard operating procedure for at least some OKC politicians.
As Anderson points out, most cities can’t name the day they were founded, their city-ness developing naturally and organically over time. But OKC can name the day, and even the hour (noon), when a gun was fired into the blue skies overhead sending thousands hurtling by oxcart, wagon, horse, and on foot to claim what they could of what would become OKC. If you think there might have been some confusion in this plan, you would be right. It took years and more than a few fights, both legal and physical, to iron out who owned what.
From its birth onward, OKC worried about its standing in the world. Tulsa was a competitive threat, so was Houston. To wrest the state capital title away from Tulsa, OKC decided to get bigger. They began what Anderson describes as the Annexation Period, eventually expanding its city boundaries to 607 square miles, even though the population today is only around 600,000. That’s a lot of land per capita.
One of my favorite people in this book is the famed weatherman Gary England of KWTV, who during his lengthy career saw Oklahomans through devastating tornadoes with his calm and reassuring voice. He helped create the First Warning System we see on TV today, and could tell when a bad one was coming just by smelling the air. It smells like fish.
Anderson writes about the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building bombing in such detail that I felt I was onsite. I could feel the blast and smell the fertilizer. The impact of that tragedy affected everyone in Oklahoma City, and Thunder management makes sure each new player joining the team tours the site, the museum, and monument to the 168 lives lost.
Some of the book, like the above, is solemn, some humorous, but all of it creates a wonderful, yes, kaleidoscopic and deep understanding of one of the ten largest cities—at least by land mass—in the United States, a city that is ever bouncing between boom and bust.
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