New Website for "Boom, Bust, Boom"
This is just a quick post to announce my new website for "Boom, Bust, Boom - A Story About Copper, The Metal That Runs The World." The new edition is published by Schaffner Press, who will be coordinating speaking engagements for me across the country. If you'd like more information, or would like to contact me to arrange a visit, please go to our website: www.boombustboombook.com
Here is a snippet about the book:
In following the time-honored journalistic tenet that the best stories are the ones you find in your own backyard, Bill Carter begins this account of the all-pervasive presence of copper in our lives and its cost on our health, economy, and our environment with a simple personal discovery: the presence of arsenic from leftover mine tailings in his backyard garden in the former copper mining town of Bisbee, Arizona. This revelation led him on a quest to find out as much as possible about the mineral copper, its wonderful and mysterious properties, its history in human evolution, and its omnipresence in contemporary life, being found in everything from toothpaste to cellphones. Carter explores several mining areas, past, present, and projected both in the United States and around the world, and details the environmental and health implications involved in open-surface extraction of copper ore. From boardrooms of investors in London to the mountains of Indonesia, Carter connects the dots from his humble backyard garden to the CEOs of the multibillion-dollar global copper industry, confronting a resource that is so vital yet which has the potential to cause horrendous and irrevocable damage to our planet and ourselves.
Reviews and Comments
"Boom, Bust, Boom, if you parden the wordplay, booms. It pops off the page as adventure, troubling history, ecological warning, travel narrative, even a bit of horror. If one can write horror suffused with joy of place, joy of language. Utter abandon and delight in story. Jim Harrison calls the book "hearty." I second that."
—Luis Alberto Urrea, author of "The Hummingbird's Daughter" and "The Devil's Highway"
"Bill Carter has extracted something that remains all but unnoticed by most people—copper—and told an incredible story about this amazing metal. Boom, Bust, Boom is the best sort of journalism: beautifully written, rich in detail and impossible to ignore. I particularly loved how Carter wove a personal story into a topic of global scope. I know, as a writer, how hard that is to pull off, and as a reader i am always amazed when someone does. It is a superb book."
—Sebastian Junger, author of "War" and "The Perfect Storm"
“Bill Carter’s new book is utterly engaging. I want to use the words fabulous and hearty. We often think we know the world but then we read a book that tells us we didn’t. Carter is a hard man and he humiliates the copper industry and the grave dangers they carelessly expose us to. A necessary read for thinking Americans.”
—Jim Harrison, author of "Legends of the Fall" and "Dalva"
“Boom, Bust, Boom, Carter’s powerful narrative about his pursuit of “the metal that runs the world” and how far we will go to get it. Carter is not a preacher of environmentalism nor a corporate apologist. He just wants to understand.”
—Daily Beast, Peter Madden