Boomtown Blues (Revised Edition)

Colorado Oil Shale (Mining the American West)

By: Andrew Gulliford

Narrated by: J. Bruce McRell

Length: 9 hrs and 2 mins

Publisher's summary

Boomtown Blues examines the remarkable 100-year history of oil shale development and chronicles the social, environmental, and financial havoc created by the industry's continual cycles of boom and bust.

In 1980, Exxon U.S.A., the world's largest corporation, began development of a five-billion-dollar oil shale industry in the pristine Colorado River Valley. Within eighteen months, Exxon had canceled its elaborate Colony project and 2,100 workers were immediately laid off. Boomtown Blues chronicles the social, environmental, and economic havoc created by one of the most expensive boom and bust cycles in the history of the American West. This 100-year historical account of the turbulent oil shale industry describes exploration and settlement in the Colorado River Valley as well as land ownership changes brought about since the first boom of 1915-1925.

Boomtown Blues is an important reference for historians, social scientists, environmentalists, policymakers, city planners, and all those who care about the fate of the American West.

The book is published by University Press of Colorado. The audiobook is published by University Press Audiobooks.

©2003 University Press of Colorado (P)2022 Redwood Audiobooks

Critic reviews

"Gulliford's scalpel exposes the myths and miscalculations that caused the leaders of this country to launch a synfuels fiasco a decade ago." (Stewart Udall, former U.S. Secretary of the Interior)

"An important contribution...Gulliford's full and compassionate portrait of the social consequences of corporate irresponsibility provides Westerners with a prime opportunity to wrestle with the lessons of history." (Patricia Nelson Limerick, University of Colorado at Boulder)