The Good Hand
A Memoir of Work, Brotherhood, and Transformation in an American Boomtown
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- 3,49 €
Description de l’éditeur
“A book that should be read . . . Smith brings an alchemic talent to describing physical labor.” —The New York Times Book Review
“Beautiful, funny, and harrowing.” – Sarah Smarsh, The Atlantic
“Remarkable . . . this is the book that Hillbilly Elegy should have been.” —Kirkus Reviews
A vivid window into the world of working class men set during the Bakken fracking boom in North Dakota
Like thousands of restless men left unmoored in the wake of the 2008 economic crash, Michael Patrick Smith arrived in the fracking boomtown of Williston, North Dakota five years later homeless, unemployed, and desperate for a job. Renting a mattress on a dirty flophouse floor, he slept boot to beard with migrant men who came from all across America and as far away as Jamaica, Africa and the Philippines. They ate together, drank together, argued like crows and searched for jobs they couldn't get back home. Smith's goal was to find the hardest work he could do--to find out if he could do it. He hired on in the oil patch where he toiled fourteen hour shifts from summer's 100 degree dog days to deep into winter's bracing whiteouts, all the while wrestling with the demons of a turbulent past, his broken relationships with women, and the haunted memories of a family riven by violence.
The Good Hand is a saga of fear, danger, exhaustion, suffering, loneliness, and grit that explores the struggles of America's marginalized boomtown workers—the rough-hewn, castoff, seemingly disposable men who do an indispensable job that few would exalt: oil field hands who, in the age of climate change, put the gas in our tanks and the food in our homes. Smith, who had pursued theater and played guitar in New York, observes this world with a critical eye; yet he comes to love his coworkers, forming close bonds with Huck, a goofy giant of a young man whose lead foot and quick fists get him into trouble with the law, and The Wildebeest, a foul-mouthed, dip-spitting truck driver who torments him but also trains him up, and helps Smith "make a hand."
The Good Hand is ultimately a book about transformation--a classic American story of one man's attempt to burn himself clean through hard work, to reconcile himself to himself, to find community, and to become whole.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Smith impresses in this fascinating debut memoir about his 2013 move from Brooklyn, N.Y., to Williston, N.Dak., to become an oil field hand. Modeling his life on Teddy Roosevelt, who transformed himself from a "squeaky-voiced four-eyed dork" to an "Indiana Jones president," Smith set out to mature from a self-indulgent kid into a man "tough as a hickory knot" by "be beaten and pummeled, knocked down" by hard labor. He began as a truck driver's assistant and describes, in the profanity-laced language of his new colleagues, how he developed a kinship with them. Many were abused by their fathers and Smith, likewise, recounts his own memories of abuse ("Dad had threatened to kill us, yes, but it wasn't the first time"). He also describes how he forced himself to compartmentalize his coworkers' "casual, constant, continuing faucet drip of racism." Over the course of a year he earned their respect while discovering that "a good hand... is a person who does honest work to the best of their ability every day and who offers that work as a living prayer." Smith's prose shines when sharing how his experience on the oil rig shaped his idea of what it means to live a meaningful life. This page-turner delivers.
