Boom Town

“Sly [and] entertaining . . . 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 (Editors’ Choice)

“[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. . . . 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. . . Anderson’s curious, hilarious, and wildly erudite book vividly evokes the bond he describes here, as it holds together, quivers, and remakes itself over the following century.”—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. . . . [Boom Town is] 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.”—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

“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 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

“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.”— The 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