Preface
Part 1: Headwater
Part 2: Venus Rising
Part 3: Red Harvest
Part 4: Clark Fork
Part 5: Opportunity
Part 6: Revival
Part 7: Confluence
A Word About Facts
Acknowledgements
Sources
Credits
Brad Tyer has worked as an editor at the MissoulaIndependentand the
Texas Observer. His writing has appeared inOutside,High Country
News,and the New York Times Book Review, among other
publications.
From the Hardcover edition.
“Mr. Tyer has written a lovely book, searing in its anger, about a
beautiful but much abused place.” —Larry McMurtry
“This previously neglected subject provides a great way to talk
about the crazy doubleness of Montana, a state we've idealized and
plundered for two hundred years. Opportunity's story lines stretch
not only across the state but around the country and the world, and
Brad Tyer is just the person to follow them. His writing is
straightforward, heartfelt, and elegant.” —Ian Frazier, author
of Travels in Siberia and Great Plains
“Tyer’s evocative prose of quiet melancholy and gentle
humor.”—Kirkus Reviews
“That the most scapegoated place in Montana is called ‘Opportunity’
is an irony so rich that a skilled blacksmith could forge it into
swords, or plowshares, as the spirit moved. Brad Tyer is that
blacksmith. Deploying a unique blend of journalistic acumen, lyric
scholarship, and canoemanship, Tyer has fashioned an emblematic
history, biopsy, and eulogy not just of a river and town, but of
the thankfully dying extraction juggernauts of the post-industrial
West.” —David James Duncan, author of The River Why
and The Brothers K
“Memoir, history, and the unequal application of economic justice
come together in Tyer’s deeply felt and sharply penned nonfiction
debut.”—Publisher's Weekly
“Brad Tyer, in this excellently reported book, asks a fundamental
question: is it fair that Missoula, a thriving little city, gets
its poisons cleaned up at the expense of Opportunity? Citizens in
Opportunity don’t think so. As the globe industrializes, even more
toxic waste is being created, and while we can move it around, we
can’t make it go away. Pretty soon we'll be eager to mend our ways.
But how? We should all be reading Opportunity,
Montana.” —William Kittredge, author of Hole in the Sky and
The Nature of Generosity “An intelligent, insightful, and finely
crafted book that channels outrage into clear
thinking.”—Booklist
“Industrial progress always leaves a hidden country of spills and
blight. In this powerful and poignant memoir, Brad Tyer takes us up
the river into one of America’s own ravaged quarters and asks
important questions about how we lock away parts of our
history. This is not just a book about burying a deadly
inheritance; it’s about fathers and sons and the erasing flow
of time. An amazing debut from one who knows the country
intimately.” —Tom Zoellner, author of Uranium: War Energy
and the Rock That Shaped the World
“Tyer blends nature writing and memoir, focused on his estrangement
from a perfectionist father, with cultural history and journalistic
reporting, including interviews with a variety of local players.
The mix can seem a bit unwieldy. But the result is an engaging,
almost breathtaking bit of nonfiction.” —Billings Gazette
“When a story about slag heaps and sluices can make the hair on the
back of your neck stand up, you know you're holding rare ore.”
—Missoula Independent
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