Boys and oil: growing up gay in a fractured land - Taylor Brorby

I am a child of the American West, a landscape so rich and wide that my culture trembles with terror before its power.

So begins Taylor Brorby's Boys and Oil , a haunting, bracingly honest memoir about growing up gay amidst the harshness of rural North Dakota, a place where there is no safety in a ravaged landscape of mining and fracking.

In visceral prose, Brorby recounts his upbringing in the coalfields; his adolescent infatuation with books; and how he felt intrinsically different from other boys.

Now an environmentalist, Brorby uses the destruction of large swathes of the West as a metaphor for the terror he experienced as a youth.

From an assault outside a bar in an oil boom town to a furtive romance, and from his awakening as an activist to his arrest at the Dakota Access Pipeline, Boys and Oil provides a startling portrait of an America that persists despite well-intentioned legal protections.