Join us for a special talk with local writer, Amy Gamerman. You may know her better as Amy Conley, Old Lyme resident, mother of Max, Sarah, Jack and Gloria! She will discuss her new book, The Crazies: The Cattleman, the Wind Prospector, and a War Out West. Copies of the book will be available for purchase to benefit the Library.
About the Book: Most locals in Big Timber, Montana learn to live with the wind. Rick Jarrett sought his fortune in it. Like his pioneer ancestors who staked their claims in the Treasure State, he believed in his right to make a living off the land—and its newest precious resource, million-dollar wind.
Trouble was, Jarrett’s neighbors were some of the wealthiest and most influential men in America, trophy ranchers who’d come West to enjoy magnificent mountain views, not stare at 500-foot wind turbines. And so began an epic showdown that would pull in an ever-widening cast of larger-than-life characters, including a Texas oil and gas tycoon, a roguish wind prospector, a Crow activist fighting for his tribe’s rights to the mountains they hold sacred, and an Olympic athlete-turned-attorney whose path to redemption would lead to Jarrett’s wind farm. A wildly entertaining yarn, the brawl over Crazy Mountain Wind would become a fight over the values that define us as Americans—and a window into how this country actually works. All the while, the most coveted rangeland in the West was being threatened by forces more powerful than anything one man could muster: dwindling snowpack, record drought, raging wildfires.
The Crazies is a Western for a warming planet, full of cowboys and billionaires and billionaire cowboys. But it’s also so much more. It’s an exquisitely reported, ruggedly beautiful elegy for a vanishing way of life and a bighearted inquiry into how you can love a place so much you risk destroying it.
About Amy: Amy Gamerman is a longtime contributor to the Wall Street Journal’s Mansion section. Prior to, she was a WSJ’s drama critic and a staff writer. Her writing has appeared in Vogue and Redbook and been recognized with several awards, including from the National Association of Real Estate Editors. She attended Yale University and King’s College, Cambridge. Gamerman lives in Connecticut with her husband, writer and editor Kevin Conley, and their four children. The Crazies is her first book.
