Lone Star : A History Of Texas And The Texans

Lone Star is seven hundred sixty-seven pages of fascinating stories about Texas. It's all here—the original peoples, the Spanish explorers, the Mexican settlers, the American settlers, the wars, and Texas as part of Mexico, Texas as an independent nation, and Texas as part of the United States. As I read along, I kept thinking how much reading these stories explains a lot about the way Texas is now—the conflicts on the border today mirroring conflicts on the border many years ago, the desire of Texans to be independent of a central government, the way the rainfall on the land has shaped the agriculture and ranching of the state. A compelling read.