The Good Hand

Oil work is hard, manual and deadly. In this blistering memoir, Michael Flanagan Smith offers a vision of what life is like for the men doing the world’s dirty work.

Mike fell into life as an oil field worker. As he says in the first lines of the book, ‘Like most people who rely on oil for nearly every aspect of their existence, I didn’t know anything about a drilling rig.’

Oil powers transport, heats homes, makes plastic, and serves as an essential ingredient in everything from medicine to farming.

In this searing memoir, Mike tells the story of the men who flocked to work in oil. It’s a story of damaged, lost men who are disposable to the industry; of the homelessness and violence attached to the competition to find work; of the secret inner workings of the fracking boom and the way it distorted communities beyond recognition.

Evocative, powerful, clear-eyed, this book drills into what life is like today for working class Americans. Can we start telling the truth about the overlooked men of rural America? Can a person with everything going wrong for them burn their life clean with hard work?