sneak peak

Beacon Press’ forthcoming catalog will have the following copy regarding Opportunity, Montana: Big Copper, Bad Water, and the Burial of an American Landscape…

A memoir-meets-exposé that examines our fraught relationship with the West and our attempts to clean up a toxic environmental legacy.

 Montana—dubbed “Big Sky Country” and “The Last Best Place”—has long exerted a mythic pull on the American imagination as an unspoiled landscape. But behind the slogans lies a darker narrative about the brutal extraction of copper. The misleadingly named community of Opportunity, Montana was exploited first by the copper barons who built the hamlet on wetlands doubling as a heavy-metal waste dump, and more recently by affluent exurbanites and well-meaning environmentalists with plans to restore the nearby Clark Fork River to its “natural” state. Opportunity, Montana is a story of progress and sacrifice, of copper and water, of father and son, and of our attempts to redeem the mistakes of the past.

 “Straightforward, heartfelt, and elegant.” —Ian Frazier, author of Travels in Siberia and Great Plains

 Brad Tyer has worked as an editor at Austin’s Texas Observer and Missoula’s Independent. His writing has appeared in Outside, The New York Times Book Review, Texas Monthly, and High Country News, among other publications. Recipient of a 2010 Knight-Wallace Journalism Fellowship at the University of Michigan, a 2011 Fishtrap writing residency, and a 2011 grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism, Tyer divides his time between Texas and Montana.

The publication date has been set for March 5, 2013.