The phrase windfall conjures photographs of unanticipated abundance: candy apples fallen from the tree, ripe for the taking; cash unexpectedly present in a coat pocket; or a shock inheritance of wealth. Erika Bolstad, journalist and former investigative reporter for Climatewire, presents these varieties of surprising riches in Windfall, a private household story wrapped in a historical past of mineral rights, the oil and fuel trade, the exhausting realities for girls homesteading within the early twentieth century and the American myths of exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny.
This heartfelt, meticulously researched memoir hinges on the writer’s great-grandmother Anna Josephine Sletvold, a daughter of Norwegian immigrants who arrange a homestead in North Dakota within the early 1900s. In 1907, in response to household lore, Anna disappeared.
More than 100 years later, Bolstad’s mom acquired a shock $2,400 test from an oil firm—a fee for leasing the mineral rights beneath the floor of the lands the place Anna’s homestead as soon as was, on the edge of North Dakota’s worthwhile Bakken oil fields. She was jubilant. “We could be rich” had been whispered all through their household historical past, beginning within the early Fifties when North Dakota started its quest for oil, and when Bolstad’s grandparents entered right into a lease settlement for royalties on mineral rights.
A short while later, Bolstad’s mom died, abandoning a thriller that sparked the writer’s investigative bent: What precisely had occurred to Anna? And was the likelihood of riches from oil-related wealth a actuality or a chimera? Bolstad writes that this thriller “was my inheritance, my windfall. My story to tell.”
Into the private material of this memoir, wherein Bolstad recounts her seek for how Anna was “lost,” the writer weaves a sturdy historical past of the Homestead Act; the rise and fall of the North Dakota oil fields; the customarily nefarious practices corporations employed to make enormous earnings on the expense of lands, employees and the general public; and the political, financial and environmental implications of America’s unending quest for power—and wealth.
With a lot pressing concern over local weather change and the impacts—environmental, political, financial and social—we people have on our planet, Windfall is a well timed, insightful and essential learn.
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