Sam Anderson first went to Oklahoma City in 2012 to write about its professional basketball team for The New York Times Magazine. He didn’t know then that he was embarking on a much longer project, a portrait of the city that he says is “the most secretly interesting place in America”. That portrait has now been published in Boom Town (Crown), which, as the subtitle has it, is “The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City, Its Chaotic Founding, Its Apocalyptic Weather, Its Purloined Basketball Team, and the Dream of Becoming a World-Class Metropolis.” The book is reviewed in the current NY Times Book Review, and Anderson talks about it in a podcast.