The Crazies

The Cattleman, the Wind Prospector, and a War Out West

By: Amy Gamerman

Narrated by: Anna Sale

A dazzling piece of narrative nonfiction about land lust and the American West, The Crazies 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. All the while, the most coveted rangeland in the West was being threatened by forces more powerful than anything one man could muster: dwindling snowpack, record drought, raging wildfires.

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.

©2025 Amy Gamerman (P)2025 Simon & Schuster Audio

Critic reviews

“Gamerman's captivating account of the struggle over private property, conservation, renewable energy and greed in a small corner of Montana is a gripping parable for our times.”—BookPage

“A fascinating story about the new energy economy. If you want to understand why change does—or doesn't—happen in America, read The Crazies.”—Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sixth Extinctio

“The Crazies has the sweep of The Grapes of Wrath and the storytelling power of Wallace Stegner’s The Big Rock Candy Mountain.”—Rinker Buck, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Oregon Trail