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adastraperlibris's review against another edition
funny
informative
lighthearted
reflective
medium-paced
4.75
rodneywilhite's review
My first memories of downtown Oklahoma City were in May 1996, when Bricktown was a decimated wasteland. I went to a semi-legal warehouse rave (there were lots of them in Bricktown at the time), and the things that stand out were seeing a line of people passed out by a nitrous tank, hearing gunshots and a man screaming from an empty building on my way back to the freeway, and, once I arrived home in Norman, learning that the employees of a record store near campus found a severed head in a dumpster. None of these things seemed so terrifying to me in my invincible late teens, however--just part of the swirl of strangeness that defined the metro-OKC area at the time. The Murrah bombing seemed to me a million years in the past (although it was barely a year), and I thought downtown had always been a collection of abandoned buildings and vacant lots.
OKC is a hard city to love, yet I haven’t been able to stop loving it even though I’ve been gone for fifteen years now. I thought Boom Town did a fair job of capturing some of its essence, but the truth is no two people live in the same city, so it couldn’t have been a portrait of the city I fell in love with in its pre-renaissance shambles: pho restaurants, taquerias, flea markets, broke college kids living in dilapidated half-a-mansion duplexes, the unremodeled Sears on S. Western that made me feel like I’d stepped back to 1964, going to a party at the house of the owner of my local bar and seeing in the bathroom the taxidermied body of what was apparently history’s greatest fighting rooster--these are all experiences individual to me and I couldn’t have expected them to appear in the book. But I did, somehow. I’m addicted to urban histories for this reason, they can provide a framework of Things That Happened There, but they can only hint at What ‘There’ Means.
Unlike Anderson, though, the Oklahoma City I knew and know has nothing to do with the Thunder, and I don’t see them as any sort of metaphor for its history. They’re just something that happened. I will say, though, that the Thunder sections of the book (comprising about half) are the best-written parts. Anderson is a sports writer, and a good one. He captures the personalities and action on the court very well. But his view of OKC is always outsider-ish. Like, he’s immersed enough to know to go to the Red Cup with Wayne Coyne, but not enough to know that a table of hangers-on hanging on to Wayne’s every inane pronouncement is a familiar OKC sight. For once, I’d love to read something about the city that has nothing to do with Wayne Coyne.
If you subtract Wayne and a bunch of millionaire athletes, what you’re left with is a thin overview of Things That Happened There, and it’s often very well-written. My favorite part is the chapter in which he retraces the Land Run by walking from Choctaw to OKC via NE 23rd St. That was the one chapter in which the city I know came alive and it got to the What ‘There’ Means. It’s a hubristic journey (and not an especially safe one), and there’s really nothing much there but people living their lives in a run-down, unglamourous, steeply-decayed urban sprawl with the people they love, but that’s a much better portrait of the city than a basketball team is.
OKC is a hard city to love, yet I haven’t been able to stop loving it even though I’ve been gone for fifteen years now. I thought Boom Town did a fair job of capturing some of its essence, but the truth is no two people live in the same city, so it couldn’t have been a portrait of the city I fell in love with in its pre-renaissance shambles: pho restaurants, taquerias, flea markets, broke college kids living in dilapidated half-a-mansion duplexes, the unremodeled Sears on S. Western that made me feel like I’d stepped back to 1964, going to a party at the house of the owner of my local bar and seeing in the bathroom the taxidermied body of what was apparently history’s greatest fighting rooster--these are all experiences individual to me and I couldn’t have expected them to appear in the book. But I did, somehow. I’m addicted to urban histories for this reason, they can provide a framework of Things That Happened There, but they can only hint at What ‘There’ Means.
Unlike Anderson, though, the Oklahoma City I knew and know has nothing to do with the Thunder, and I don’t see them as any sort of metaphor for its history. They’re just something that happened. I will say, though, that the Thunder sections of the book (comprising about half) are the best-written parts. Anderson is a sports writer, and a good one. He captures the personalities and action on the court very well. But his view of OKC is always outsider-ish. Like, he’s immersed enough to know to go to the Red Cup with Wayne Coyne, but not enough to know that a table of hangers-on hanging on to Wayne’s every inane pronouncement is a familiar OKC sight. For once, I’d love to read something about the city that has nothing to do with Wayne Coyne.
If you subtract Wayne and a bunch of millionaire athletes, what you’re left with is a thin overview of Things That Happened There, and it’s often very well-written. My favorite part is the chapter in which he retraces the Land Run by walking from Choctaw to OKC via NE 23rd St. That was the one chapter in which the city I know came alive and it got to the What ‘There’ Means. It’s a hubristic journey (and not an especially safe one), and there’s really nothing much there but people living their lives in a run-down, unglamourous, steeply-decayed urban sprawl with the people they love, but that’s a much better portrait of the city than a basketball team is.
sam_smith_of_tencendor's review against another edition
funny
informative
inspiring
lighthearted
slow-paced
3.0
boggremlin's review
5.0
This book was utterly bananas. I'm not a sports person, but I was completely engrossed in the way Anderson wove together all of his narrative threads; he made civics, history, basketball, and the weather into a story I could not put down.
His writing is simultaneously funny and poignant; in one chapter, he describes the reverence of opening a time capsule, or the way survivors of a tornado thanked their local weatherman, and follows it up with a description of a basketball game that includes the line, "but in this situation, he had the peripheral vision of a cyclops looking down a cardboard paper towel tube." It's evocative. I've told about eight other people to read it, and I'm sure I will suggest it to many more.
His writing is simultaneously funny and poignant; in one chapter, he describes the reverence of opening a time capsule, or the way survivors of a tornado thanked their local weatherman, and follows it up with a description of a basketball game that includes the line, "but in this situation, he had the peripheral vision of a cyclops looking down a cardboard paper towel tube." It's evocative. I've told about eight other people to read it, and I'm sure I will suggest it to many more.
joeynedland's review
5.0
Just a fantastic book. It weaves historical narratives about the founding of OKC together with anecdotes about the Thunder, the Flaming Lips, and the local weatherman in the modern day to create what amounts to a thematically consistent and truly engaging piece of non-fiction writing. The style and tone throughout is what makes this book so compelling to me, both to basketball fans and non-fans alike. Listened on audiobook, and the level of interest I had throughout is rare for non-fiction books of that format!
hank's review
3.0
A book about Oklahoma City, just as the title suggests, unfortunately this is mostly a book about the Oklahoma City Thunder, which is a basketball team, which I have very little interest in. There were some fascinating and entertaining stories about OKC that I did like....the land rush, the failed urban renewal project, some of Wayne Coyne but the main glue that held the book together was a very in depth discussion of the Thunder and the Thunder players. That could work for some but it just did not for me.