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.
“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
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