Big Wonderful Thing: A History of Texas
Ratings2
Average rating5
15
Ratings2
Average rating5
"Harrigan, surveying thousands of years of history that lead to the banh mi restaurants of Houston and the juke joints of Austin, remembering the forgotten as well as the famous, delivers an exhilarating blend of the base and the ignoble, a very human story indeed. [ Big Wonderful Thing is] as good a state history as has ever been written and a must-read for Texas aficionados.”—Kirkus, Starred Review The story of Texas is the story of struggle and triumph in a land of extremes. It is a story of drought and flood, invasion and war, boom and bust, and the myriad peoples who, over centuries of conflict, gave rise to a place that has helped shape the identity of the United States and the destiny of the world. “I couldn’t believe Texas was real,” the painter Georgia O’Keeffe remembered of her first encounter with the Lone Star State. It was, for her, “the same big wonderful thing that oceans and the highest mountains are.” Big Wonderful Thing invites us to walk in the footsteps of ancient as well as modern people along the path of Texas’s evolution. Blending action and atmosphere with impeccable research, New York Times best-selling author Stephen Harrigan brings to life with novelistic immediacy the generations of driven men and women who shaped Texas, including Spanish explorers, American filibusters, Comanche warriors, wildcatters, Tejano activists, and spellbinding artists—all of them taking their part in the creation of a place that became not just a nation, not just a state, but an indelible idea. Written in fast-paced prose, rich with personal observation and a passionate sense of place, Big Wonderful Thing calls to mind the literary spirit of Robert Hughes writing about Australia or Shelby Foote about the Civil War. Like those volumes, it is a big book about a big subject, a book that dares to tell the whole glorious, gruesome, epically sprawling story of Texas.
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Texas is a big wonderful thing and this is a big wonderful book about this big wonderful thing. Stephen Harrigan attempts to cover it all in a mere 925 pages: the Alamo; Stephen F(uller) Austin; the Battle of San Jacinto; Judge Roy Bean; Bonnie and Clyde; the Branch Dividian compound in Mt. Carmel; Brown & Root; buffalo soldiers; George H. W. and George W. Bush; Cabeza de Vaca; the Caddo Indians; Camino Real; carpetbaggers; cattle drives; Cherokee Indians; Seven Cities of Cibola; the Civil War; Colt revolvers; the Comanches; John Connally; cowboys; Davy Crockett; Crystal City, Texas; Czech and German immigrants; Martin Dies; the Dust Bowl; Dale Evans; Edna Ferber; “Pa” and “Ma” Ferguson; football; Fort Davis; the Galveston hurricane; John Nance Garner; Charles Goodnight; James Hogg; horses; Sam Houston; Humble Oil; Jefferson, Texas; Lyndon Baines Johnson; Janis Joplin; Barbara Jordan; the Karankawas; the assassination of John F. Kennedy; the Kilgore Rangerettes; the King Ranch; the Ku Klux Klan; Jean Lafitte; Tom Landry; lynchings of African-Americans; Mary Kay; mavericks; Larry McMurtry; Mexican-Americans; the moon landing; Nacogdoches, Texas; Jose Antonio Navarro; Madalyn Murray O'Hair; Georgia O'Keeffe; open range; Lee Harvey Oswald; Padre Island; Palo Duro Canyon; Cynthia Ann and Quanah Parker; George Parr; the pecan shelling business; the Piney Woods; the prison system; Prohibition; railroads; Reconstruction; the Republic of Texas; Ann Richards; the Rio Grande; Roe v. Wade; the Runaway Scrape; Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna; the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s; Selena; Allan Shivers; slavery; the Southwest Conference; Spanish land grants; Spanish missions; Spindletop; the State Fair of Texas; Tejanos; tenant farmers; “Texas, Our Texas”; the explosion in Texas City, Texas; the Texas Rangers; the University of Texas; Ralph Yarborough; “The Yellow Rose of Texas”; and Lorenzo de Zavala. Whew. All these stories told as if the author were sitting around the campfire, swapping tales. And, even so, the author concludes the book regretting the things he was unable to include.
