Most locals in Big Timber, Montana learn to live with the wind. Rick Jarrett sought his fortune in it. Like his pioneer ancestors who staked their claims in the Treasure State, he believed in his right to make a living off the land—and its newest precious resource, million-dollar wind.
Trouble was, Jarrett’s neighbors were some of the wealthiest and most influential men in America, trophy ranchers who’d come West to enjoy magnificent mountain views, not stare at 500-foot wind turbines.
And so began an epic showdown that would pull in an ever-widening cast of larger-than-life characters, including a Texas oil and gas tycoon, a roguish wind prospector, a Crow activist fighting for his tribe’s rights to the mountains they hold sacred, and an Olympic athlete-turned-attorney whose path to redemption would lead to Jarrett’s wind farm. A wildly entertaining yarn, the brawl over Crazy Mountain Wind would become a fight over the values that define us as Americans—and a window into how this country actually works. All the while, the most coveted rangeland in the West was being threatened by forces more powerful than anything one man could muster: dwindling snowpack, record drought, raging wildfires.
The Crazies is a Western for a warming planet, full of cowboys and billionaires and billionaire cowboys. But it’s also so much more. It’s an exquisitely reported, ruggedly beautiful elegy for a vanishing way of life and a bighearted inquiry into how you can love a place so much you risk destroying it.
Amy Gamerman is a longtime contributor to the Wall Street Journal’s Mansion section. Prior to, she was the WSJ’s drama critic and a staff writer on the Leisure & Arts page. Her work has been recognized with multiple awards from the National Association of Real Estate Editors. Her writing has also appeared in Vogue, Redbook, and Departures. She attended Yale University and King’s College, Cambridge. Gamerman lives in Connecticut with her husband, writer and editor Kevin Conley, and their four children. The Crazies is her first book.
Copies of The Crazies will be available to purchase courtesy of Breakwater Books.
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