Author Tour: Amy Gamerman of The Crazies: The Cattleman, The Wind Prospector and the War Out West

Author and Wall Street Journal contributor Amy Gamerman tours western Montana – making stops in Big Timber, Bozeman, Hamilton, Livingston, Missoula and Helena where she'll be in conversation with veteran/retired journalist Mike Dennison at Montana Book Company on April 2nd at 6:30 pm to present her new novel The Crazies: The Cattleman, the Wind Prospector, and a War Out West (January 11, 2025; Simon & Schuster).

The Crazies is a dazzling piece of narrative nonfiction about land lust and the American West, which tells the story of a wind farm that triggers a 21st century range war between a struggling fifth-generation rancher and the billionaires next door.

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.

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.

"Gamerman’s battle of wits and will is as epic as the land itself." —Booklist

Start Time 6:30 pm End Time 8:00 pm