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Summary
Summary
NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST * The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Looming Tower --and a Texas native--takes us on a journey through the most controversial state in America. * "Beautifully written.... Essential reading [for] anyone who wants to understand how one state changed the trajectory of the country." --NPR
The inspiration for the HBO Original documentary trilogy God Save Texas streaming on Max
Texas is a red state, but the cities are blue and among the most diverse in the nation. Oil is still king, but Texas now leads California in technology exports. Low taxes and minimal regulation have produced extraordinary growth, but also striking income disparities. Texas looks a lot like the America that Donald Trump wants to create.
Bringing together the historical and the contemporary, the political and the personal, Texas native Lawrence Wright gives us a colorful, wide-ranging portrait of a state that not only reflects our country as it is, but as it may become--and shows how the battle for Texas's soul encompasses us all.
Author Notes
Lawrence Wright (born August 2, 1947), Pulitzer Prize winning author, graduated from Tulane University and spent two years teaching at the American University in Cairo, Egypt.
Wright is a staff writer for The New Yorker and a fellow at the Center on Law and Security at New York University School of Law.
Wright is the author of the books God Save Texas: A Journey into the Soul of the Lone Star State (2018), Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief (2013), Pulitzer Prize winning non-fiction The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (2006), Noriega: God's Favorite (2000), Twins: And What They Tell Us About Who We Are (1999), Remembering Satan (1994), Saints & Sinners (1993), In the New World: Growing Up in America, 1964-1984 (1987), and City Children, Country Summer: A Story of Ghetto Children Among the Amish (1979).
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Wright (The Terror Years), a Pulitzer winner and New Yorker staff writer, takes an unflinching look at Texas-the state where he has spent most of his life-in all its grandeur and contradictions. A clear-sighted and often witty reporter, Wright highlights the state's past and present political figures (among them Lyndon Johnson, both Bush presidents, Ann Richards, and Ted Cruz); entrenched belief in low taxes and minimal regulation; booming economy of oil and technology exports; and track record of subpar social services and legislative accomplishments (redistricting, open carry and concealed carry gun laws). Wright also showcases three of the state's fastest-growing cities: Houston, the only major U.S. metropolis without zoning laws; Dallas, with its history of reinvention after John F. Kennedy's assassination and currently hot market for commercial construction; and Austin, with its high rate of start-up companies and its citizenry devoted to "quirky passions." Interspersed throughout are the author's personal reflections on growing up in Texas and on why he continues to live there. The demographics of this vast and diverse state suggest it's far more progressive than its representatives, and its population is increasing at an astonishing rate. Wright's large-scale portrait, which reveals how Texas is only growing in influence, is comprehensive, insightful, and compulsively entertaining. Agent: Andrew Wylie, Wylie Agency. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Wright (The Terror Years, 2016) is a staff writer for the New Yorker, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, and a longtime resident of Texas. It is a state whose history, politics, and culture Wright finds endearing, repelling, and puzzling, all dependent upon which aspect he is exploring and describing. This thoughtful, engrossing, and often-amusing survey is a kind of waltz across Texas. Wright uses history, politics, and a series of vignettes to reveal a great deal about a state that may soon surpass California in population and economic dynamism. Wright shows how the activities of several intrepid and ruthless entrepreneurs fostered Texas' modern oil-based economy. He touches on the heritage of the cowboy culture, as seen through Charles Goodnight, who inspired Larry McMurtry's novel Lonesome Dove (1985). Wright provides an affectionate yet critical portrait of Lyndon Johnson. As a Texan, Wright despises the condescension and snobbery directed at his state, but he finds the casual bigotry and ignorance of many Texans infuriating. He recalls the bipartisanship that once characterized politics in contrast to the current domination by Republican ideologues. This is an important book about a state and people who will continue to have a large impact on the U.S.--Freeman, Jay Copyright 2018 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
GOD SAVE TEXAS: A Journey Into the Soul of the Lone Star State, by Lawrence Wright. (Vintage, $16.95.) Wright, a Pulitzer Prizewinning journalist and longtime resident of the state, explores Texas' foibles, ironies and contradictions with affection. Given the state's booming population and economic growth, Wright's book seems to say, America's future runs through Texas - whether the rest of the country likes it or not. HOW IT HAPPENED, by Michael Koryta. (Back Bay/Little, Brown, $16.99.) In this murder mystery, Rob Barrett, an interrogation specialist with the F.B.I., is sent to investigate a double homicide that's rattled the town of Port Hope, Me. He believes the confession by a young addict, who directs him to where she says the bodies can be found. But when the details don't seem to pan out, he's kicked off the case. UNEASY PEACE: The Great Crime Decline, the Renewal of City Life, and the Next War on Violence, by Patrick Sharkey. (Norton, $16.95.) What's the downside to falling crime rates nationwide? In Sharkey's analysis, what was done to make those rates plunge included increased incarceration rates and violent policing tactics. This book admirably connects the story of how the country became safer with why many communities are wary of the police. A LONG WAY FROM HOME, by Peter Carey. (Vintage, $16.95.) A married couple and their bachelor neighbor set out on a 10,000-mile endurance contest around Australia in the hopes of eventually opening their own auto dealership. Our reviewer, Craig Taylor, praised this shape-shifting, propulsive novel, writing: "With all its inventive momentum, all its pleasurable beats, the fast pace of the race, the scenery unfurling, the novel ends up far from where it started, in a place of historical reckoning and colonial guilt." THE MAKING OF A DREAM: How a Group of Young Undocumented Immigrants Helped Change What It Means to Be American, by Laura Wides-Muñoz. (Harper, $17.99.) WidesMuñoz chronicles the battle for immigration reform through the stories of young activists. A centerpiece of the story is the passage in 2012 of the DACA act, and how it grew out of close to two decades of grass-roots efforts and political activity. CALL ME ZEBRA, by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi. (Mariner, $14.99.) In this crackling novel, a bookish Iranian in exile retraces the journey she took with her father, and finds love along the way. As our reviewer, Liesl Schillinger, wrote, the author "relays Zebra's brainy, benighted struggles as a tragicomic picaresque whose fervid logic and cerebral whimsy recall the work of Bolaño and Borges."
Guardian Review
This hymn to his complicated home state by the author of The Looming Tower is a pleasing blend of memoir, reportage and history After my brothers bar mitzvah, my parents threw a party at our house in Austin, Texas. At one point, we noticed the rabbi had gone missing. My dad eventually found him sitting in his car outside, listening to the Texas-Oklahoma football game on the radio. Lawrence Wright tells stories such as this in his new book. Wright is a New Yorker writer whose most famous work, The Looming Tower, is about the rise of al-Qaida (it has just been turned into a Netflix series). Theres a political undertone to this one, too. Its subtitle is A Journey into the Future of America, and the argument is chiefly that Texas (and not California or New York) is the real bellwether of US life the most sensitive reflection of whats changing in it, and also the force most likely to shape it. Wright serves up a campfire stew of memoir, reportage and historical digression. He is a typically Texas storyteller, an anecdotalist who wanders around and stops occasionally to point out the view, but somehow you end up getting where youre going anyway. You can hear the New Yorker in his voice; his prose has a kind of polished informality. He starts off on a bicycle tour near San Antonio, with his friend and Virgil-figure, the novelist Steve Harrigan. He ends up camping with his wife in Big Bend national park, having a shit in the middle of the night and looking up: In every generation until mine, most of humanity lived with the night sky. As people began moving into cities and using more illumination, the sky gradually disappeared. There must be a corresponding loss of wonder without the stars to remind us where we stand in creation. Along the way, he covers a lot of ground: the Texas revolution, the founding of the republic, the introduction of slaves, the civil war, the Kennedy assassination, the oil boom (and bust and boom again), fracking, political in-fighting in the state legislature (over the bathroom ban, restricting transgender peoples access to toilets, and sanctuary cities, where cooperation with immigration law is limited), the rapid and almost complete extinction of Texas Democrats (partly engineered by the Republican adviser Karl Rove), immigration and changing demographics, Trumps Wall, Tea party politics, and the Austin music scene. Not to mention more personal subjects: his Dallas childhood, his marriage, his various professional ups and downs, the screenplay by Wright that Oliver Stone almost made, another play that was supposed to premiere in Houston until Hurricane Harvey hit, his life in Austin and the vague sense he has lived with of being stuck in the provinces, on the fringes of the real action even though the book is an argument that the real action is here. Wright is a liberal, but his sympathies range across the aisle. Like many Texans, I harbour a fondness for the Bush family that has nothing to do with their politics. He knows them personally and blames Ws complacency and absence of curiosity for the failures of his presidency, rather than anything more sinister. Rove sometimes shows up at his breakfast club and explains to Wright, among other things, how he turned Texas into a red state. But the demographics are swinging around again though the people who show up at the polls havent changed as much as the place itself. Texas isnt a red state, as the former Democratic Texas senator from Dallas, Wendy Davis, says, its a nonvoting blue state. She became famous for her 11-hour filibuster of a bill designed to limit access to abortions. (It passed anyway in the next session.) Even on issues such as gun control, Wright tries to offer a balanced view: When President Obama said, States with the most gun laws tend to have the fewest gun deaths, he was including suicides, which account for nearly two-thirds of gun deaths nationally. At one point, Wright signs up for a firearms class, so he can bypass the security queues at the state capitol. Ive experienced this phenomenon myself at the Texas book festival. The only people who can enter the grand old building (its a little taller than the Capitol in DC) unchecked are those with a piece of paper that says they are carrying a gun. Everyone else has to queue behind the metal detector to make sure they arent. In Texas, its not always easy to separate what you like from what you dont. Theres an admiring sketch of Joe Straus, the long-serving speaker of the Texas House of Representatives. Hes the kind of moderate Republican who stands for what used to be a Texas virtue pragmatism, the willingness to get things done, even if it means working with political opponents. Wright follows Straus as he struggles to defeat the bathroom bill, which is just the kind of interventionist legislation that Texans and particularly Republicans are supposed to hate. Apart from anything else, its bad for business. But the rise of the Tea party has put one set of Texas virtues under threat, in defence of what they consider to be others. The current governors pet issue is fending off the malevolent influence of California. The centre of that influence, and a city widely resented by the rest of Texas (or at least by their political representatives) is Austin, my hometown. Wright reflects: When I tell people outside the state that I live in Texas, they often look at me uncomprehendingly. Its like saying that you cheat on your taxes. But if I say I live in Austin, the nearly universal response is: Oh, Austin is cool. For them, living in Austin is forgivable in a way that living in Texas is not. His book is partly a reaction to this prejudice in favour of the rest of the state, and sometimes at the expense of Austin, which has become one of the whitest and most economically segregated cities in the country. A Texan friend of Wrights, on moving to California, said to him, Its confusing Ive never lived in a place where everybody agrees with me. But Austin is becoming that kind of place. (It was an Austinite, Bill Bishop, who reported on this phenomenon in The Big Sort about the fact that the US is increasingly arranging itself into homogeneous enclaves.) Wright, though suspicious of this obsession with Californication, sometimes bridles at the elite disdain that Californians express toward my state. Yet the Texas model he has in mind isnt Austin, its Houston one of those Texas cities that gets a bad rap from outsiders; it will soon overtake Chicago as the countrys third-largest metropolitan area, behind New York and Los Angeles. All the growth has been Latino, African American and Asian, according to Stephen Klineberg of the Kinder Institute, a local charity. Houston is now the single most ethnically diverse metro area in the country. Thats partly because of the absence of zoning laws. Liberal politicians figured that zones were a way of keeping people out, so in Houston you can build pretty much anything anywhere. And its worked Houston routinely tops lists of best places to live and has (according to the Washington Post) one of the five best restaurant scenes in the US, not to mention an excellent opera and more theatre space than any city except New York. If only so much of it werent built on a flood plain. Which is one reason the centre of the US energy industry is going to have to face the problem of climate change. The hope for Houston and Texas is that it is in our basic DNA to do what is needed to succeed, Klineberg tells Wright. And his friend Mimi Swartz, a longtime writer for the Texas Monthly, puts it this way: This place could be either London or Lagos. On the whole, Wright is semi-optimistic. Part of the point of the book is to talk about the way the kinds of stories he tells shape peoples sense of where they live. The myths matter, too. Sanford Levinson, a distinguished law professor at [the University of Texas], compares Texas to Scotland another formerly independent nation that has never entirely accepted the loss of its independence. As it happens, I grew up with Sandy, another Texan Jew hes a colleague of my parents. Theres a toast Jews make at Passover: Next year in Jerusalem, we say, at the end of the service. For me, and my brother and two sisters who live away, the Jerusalem we dream of coming back to is Austin. - Benjamin Markovits.
Kirkus Review
One of the state's most renowned writers takes readers deep into the heart of Texas.As a staffer for the New Yorker and a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Wright (The Terror Years: From Al-Qaeda to the Islamic State, 2016, etc.) has illuminated a variety of intriguing subcultures. His native Texas is as exotic as any of them. He approaches his subject on a number of levels: as a stereotype, a movie myth, a cultural melting pot, a borderland, a harbinger of what is to come in an increasingly polarized and conservative country, and as a crucible that has shaped the character of a young writer who couldn't wait to escape but was drawn back. "Some maybe cowardly instinct whispered to me that if I accepted the offer to live elsewhere, I would be someone other than myself," he writes. "My life might have been larger, but it would have been counterfeit. I would not be home." The Austin-based author makes himself at home in these pages, traveling through Austin, Dallas, Houston, and El Paso and exploring the desolate wonders of Big Bend, "one of the least-visited national parks in the country, and also one of the most glorious," and the West Texas wonders of Marfa, Lubbock, and Wink. The chapter on the levels of Texas culture, an updated version of a Texas Monthly piece from 1993, is particularly incisive. But the misadventures of the Texas legislature are what will strike most readers with an uneasy mixture of amazement, amusement, and disbelief; one law, notes the author, allows citizens to "openly carry swords, a welcome development for the samurai in our midst." Once a Democratic bulwark (albeit conservatively so), the state has since become even more conservatively Republican, though a population that is not only growing, but growing younger and more diversethe "Anglo" majority has become the minoritycould make the state very much in play.A revelationWright finds the reflection of his own conflicted soul in the native state he loves and has hated. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Pulitzer Prize winner and longtime Austin resident Wright (The Looming Tower; The Terror Years) delivers an impressive ode to the Lone Star State in this work that is outside his typical journalistic focus. Written in a balanced tone, this narrative examines Texas' historical, political, and social fabrics that make the present tapestry, revealing a portrait of one of the most perplexing American states. Wright's analyses of Hurricane Harvey and 2017 legislative battles, along with the ambush of Dallas police officers in 2016 give the work currency. However, this reviewer wishes that Wright would have had a chance to evaluate the Astros' championship and the Sutherland Springs church massacre. Beyond that untimely omission, the author has done a masterful service of revealing both the warts and beauty of Texas' big state of mind. VERDICT Highly recommended for Texans and non-Texans alike, who are interested in works about the current zeitgeist.-Jacob Sherman, John Peace Lib., Univ. of Texas at San Antonio © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.