People throughout the world use crude oil products in some form every day: the plastic bottles we drink from, the gasoline that powers our vehicles, and the desks we sit at in school and work. These are all things that make our lives easier. However, we might not have access to them without the hard work put in by oil rig workers. These men and women work on offshore oil rigs away from their friends and families for weeks at a time. Readers will learn...

Zach's father dies on an oil rig and he thinks he is headed toward a similar fate until he meets Vanessa, an optimistic and wealthy girl who wants to study astronomy. Off the coast of the small California town of Orilla del Cielo, the silhouettes of oil rigs loom. To Zach, they are a reminder of loss-- his father, an oil worker, drowned years earlier. With his family struggling to make ends meet, Zach feels he's destined for the same bleak future....

For the one hundred and twenty-six people aboard the Deepwater Horizon offshore oil rig, April 20, 2010, began like any normal day. Before day's end, the world would bear witness to one of the greatest man-made disasters in U.S. history. It reveals the brave acts of the men and women who rose to the challenge and risked everything to lead others to safety.

The booming North Dakota oil business is spawning "man camps," shantytowns full of men hired to work on the rigs, in towns without enough housing to accommodate them. In such twilight spaces, it's easy for a person to vanish. And when two young men in their first year on the job disappear without a trace, only their mothers believe there's hope of finding them. Despite reassurances that the police are on the case, the two women think the oil company...

"Spanning multiple generations and nearly 80 years, this emotional tour de force follows one American family, during the radical movement of the 1968 against Big Oil, as they are forced to reckon with the consequences of the resources that built their fortune and fueled their greatest tragedy"--