The crazies A cattleman, the wind prospector, and a war out west

Review by Booklist Review

When the setting is Montana's staggeringly scenic Crazy Mountains, the idea of any man-made change to the natural landscape will generate a case of NIMBY on steroids. Yet when two multigenerational ranchers with failing livestock enterprises decided to install income-generating windmills on their land, they found themselves and their supporters to be a few Davids going up against many Goliaths, including a Texas oil magnate, a high-powered Las Vegas attorney, and a Manhattan hedge-fund manager. Each had their own idea of legacy and ownership, conservation and exploitation. Did protecting eagles and elk trump private property rights? A longtime real-estate reporter for the Wall Street Journal, Gamerman has an expert's facility for navigating the myriad moving parts involved in seeking answers to the question of who has the right to develop resources on their own land. As she untangles the bureaucratic boondoggles and legal strategies, Gamerman demonstrates that it's a miracle that anything anywhere ever gets accomplished. Gamerman's battle of wits and will is as epic as the land itself.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

A new kind of range war roils a small town in this intricate debut account. Wall Street Journal reporter Gamerman recaps a zoning and development controversy in the picturesque Crazy Mountains region near Big Timber, Mont. On one side were Rick Jarrett, a debt-saddled cattle rancher worried about losing his land, and Marty Wilde, a wildcat wind prospector trying to develop a wind farm on Jarrett's property. Opposing them were billionaire oilman Russell Gordy and other wealthy ranch owners whose mountain vistas and property values would be compromised, they insisted, by having 500-foot-tall turbines nearby. The conflict led to lawsuits and a court showdown that spotlighted the muddled ideologies and class politics of renewable energy, with desperate but traditionalist ranch families haphazardly aligned with progressive environmentalists while squaring off against plutocratic NIMBYs--who championed pristine wilderness aesthetics over economic development, bemoaned the threat posed to eagles and bats by the turbine blades, and cited the potential human health risks of the whooshing noise and flickering shadows they produce. Gamerman's lush prose evokes the imprint of the harsh, beautiful landscape on its more hard-bitten inhabitants. ("The wind was a steady force that was always working against you.... The wind was as much a part of Rick's legacy as the land itself. People were buying wind? Well, goddammit, he had wind to sell.") It's a captivating saga. (Jan.)

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

How a proposed wind farm set off epic struggles on one of America's new frontiers. This account of a modern land battle in the American West, told dramatically in the form of narrative nonfiction, explores "a story centuries in the making, with millionaires and billionaires, cattle barons and Crow warriors, prospectors and politicians, meat-packers and medicine men." A coveted region of Montana stands at the center of the complex disputes described here, with competing factions pursuing sometimes incompatible aims: developing wind power, securing ancestral tribal rights, or reserving the picturesque landscape for private and commercial interests. The various scenes that play out suggest a reiteration of the nation's frontier history, with lax regulation of aggressive instincts and enormous disparities in power. The author's brisk, consistently engaging storytelling vividly sets forth the financial stakes involved for those who control the land and its energy potential and the cultural and personal stakes for those who seek to prolong traditional ways of life. We gain a memorable sense, at last, of what this territory has meant to its Indigenous inhabitants as well as waves of settlers in the Montana region. A major difference from the 19th century, as the book makes clear, is that this 21st-century Wild West faces an existential crisis as the climate warms and ecosystems threaten collapse. Old ideals about the inexhaustibility of the nation's resources must yield to new understandings of sustainability. An enormous expansion of wind farms in places such as this, Gamerman notes, will be essential for a successful transition to a clean energy future and the mitigation of harms produced by exploitative practices. This Western narrative is, she convincingly concludes, crucially relevant to the entire nation's fate. A dynamic, informed, absorbing exploration of literal and figurative power struggles. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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