Book Description
In a lucid, brilliant work of nonfiction -- as close to
an autobiography as his readers are likely to get -- Larry
McMurtry has written a family portrait that also serves as a
larger portrait of Texas itself, as it was, and as it has
become.
Using as a springboard an essay by the German literary
critic Walter Benjamin that he first read in Archer City's
Dairy Queen, McMurtry examines the small-town way of life
that big oil and big ranching have nearly destroyed. He
praises the virtues of everything from a lime Dr Pepper and
the lost art of oral storytelling to the perfect piece of
pie, and describes the brutal effect of the sheer vastness
and emptiness of the Texas landscape on Texans, the decline
of the cowboy, the significance of small-town rodeos (and
rodeo queens), the reality and the myth of the frontier.
McMurtry writes frankly and with deep feeling about his
own experiences as a writer, a parent, a heart patient, and
he deftly lays bare the raw material that helped shape his
life's work: the creation of a vast, ambitious, fictional
panorama of Texas in the past and the present. And
throughout, McMurtry leaves his readers with constant
reminders of his all-encompassing boundless love of
literature and books -- for nobody has captured better the
romance of the book trade, in which McMurtry has famously
found an equally ambitious second career, gradually
transforming his native Archer City into a town of books,
like Britain's Hay-on-Wye.
Full of anecdotes, pithy humor, historical insights, and
wry nostalgia, this elegiac and strangely touching cominc
work is at once a literary and autobiographical tour de force
about growing up, growing famous, and growing older.
