Undaunted by the furor caused by his first listing, A. C. Greene offers a new selective survey for anyone who wants to know more about Texas and Texas books. Each of the selections in The 50+ Best Books on Texas have been completely rewritten, or added to, or updated in this 1998 offering.

One of Barack Obama’s “Favorite Books of the Year” "Phenomenal" --Justin Torres, author of We the Animals"Brilliant" --Nicole Dennis-Benn, author of Here Comes the Sun“A profound exploration of the true meaning of borders.” —The New York Times Book Review NAMED ONE OF THE 10 BEST BOOKS OF 2019 in the New York Times by Dwight GarnerA New York Times Notable Book of 2019In the city of Houston - a sprawling, diverse microcosm of America - the son of a black mother and a Latino father is coming of age. He's working at his family's restaurant, weathering his brother's blows, resenting his older sister's absence. And discovering he likes boys.Around him, others live and thrive and die in Houston's myriad neighborhoods: a young woman whose affair detonates across an apartment complex, a ragtag baseball team, a group of young hustlers, hurricane survivors, a local drug dealer who takes a Guatemalan teen under his wing, a reluctant chupacabra.Bryan Washington's brilliant, viscerally drawn world vibrates with energy, wit, raw power, and the infinite longing of people searching for home. With soulful insight into what makes a community, a family, and a life, Lot explores trust and love in all its unsparing and unsteady forms.

Erica Grieder's Texas is a state that is not only an outlier but an exaggeration of some of America's most striking virtues and flaws. Big, Hot, Cheap, and Right is a witty, enlightening inquiry into how Texas works, and why, in the future, the rest of America may look a lot like Texas.

A profile of the town of Odessa, Texas, and its high school football team--the Panthers, the high school team with the best winning record in Texas history--chronicles its dramatic 1988 season and focuses on the bitter struggle between sports and education

"What's not to enjoy about a book full of monstrous egos, unimaginable sums of money, and the punishment of greed and shortsightedness?" —The Economist Phenomenal reviews and sales greeted the hardcover publication of The Big Rich, New York Times bestselling author Bryan Burrough's spellbinding chronicle of Texas oil. Weaving together the multigenerational sagas of the industry's four wealthiest families, Burrough brings to life the men known in their day as the Big Four: Roy Cullen, H. L. Hunt, Clint Murchison, and Sid Richardson, all swaggering Texas oil tycoons who owned sprawling ranches and mingled with presidents and Hollywood stars. Seamlessly charting their collective rise and fall, The Big Rich is a hugely entertaining account that only a writer with Burrough's abilities-and Texas upbringing-could have written.

Daughters of Dallas: A History of Greater Dallas Through the Voices and Deeds of Its Women by Vivian Anderson Castleberry.

A New York Times Notable BookNational Book Critics Circle Award FinalistAn NPR Best Book of the YearGod Save Texas is a journey through the most controversial state in America. It 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.

Gone to Texas engagingly tells the story of the Lone Star State, from the arrival of humans in the Panhandle more than 10,000 years ago to the opening of the twenty-first century. Focusing on the state's successive waves of immigrants, the book offers an inclusive view of the vast array of Texans who, often in conflict with each other and always in a struggle with the land, created a history and an idea of Texas.

In the 1950s, a series of dams was proposed along the Brazos River in north-central Texas. For John Graves, this project meant that if the stream’s regimen was thus changed, the beautiful and sometimes brutal surrounding countryside would also change, as would the lives of the people whose rugged ancestors had eked out an existence there. Graves therefore decided to visit that stretch of the river, which he had known intimately as a youth.Goodbye to a Riveris his account of that farewell canoe voyage. As he braves rapids and fatigue and the fickle autumn weather, he muses upon old blood feuds of the region and violent skirmishes with native tribes, and retells wild stories of courage and cowardice and deceit that shaped both the river’s people and the land during frontier times and later. Nearly half a century after its initial publication, Goodbye to a River is a true American classic, a vivid narrative about an exciting journey and a powerful tribute to a vanishing way of life and its ever-changing natural environment.

An insider's history of Texas that examines the people, politics, and events which have shaped the Lone Star State, from prehistory to the modern day Here is an up-to-the-moment history of the Lone Star State, together with an insider's look at the people, politics, and events that have shaped Texas from the beginning right up to our days. Never before has the story been told with more vitality and immediacy. Fehrenbach re-creates the Texas saga from prehistory to the Spanish and French invasions to the heyday of the cotton and cattle empires. He dramatically describes the emergence of Texas as a republic, the vote for secession before the Civil War, and the state's readmission to the Union after the War. In the twentieth century oil would emerge as an important economic resource and social change would come. But Texas would remain unmistakably Texas, because Texans "have been made different by the crucible of history; they think and act in different ways, according to the history that shaped their hearts and minds.

The past has long fingers into the present, but they are not just the fingers of fact. How we remember the past is at least as important as the objective facts of that past. The memories used by a people to define itself have to be understood not just as (sometimes) bad history but also as historical artifacts themselves. Texas’ pasts are examined in this groundbreaking volume, featuring chapters by a wide range of scholars. Current historians’ views of Texas in the nineteenth century and especially the significance of the Alamo as a site of memory in architecture, art, and film across the years comprise a major element of this volume. Other nineteenth-century historical events are also examined through their memorializations in the twentieth century: the construction of Civil War monuments by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, public and private Juneteenth celebrations, and the Tejano memorial on the Capitol grounds commemorating the history of Mexicans in Texas. Twentieth-century chapters include collective memories and meaning attached to the Ku Klux Klan, the significance of the civil rights movement in the eyes of different generations of Texans, and the lasting (or fading) Texan memories of Lyndon Baines Johnson. The volume editors offer these studies as a model of how Texas historians can begin to incorporate memory into their work, as historians of other regions have done. In the process, they offer a more nuanced and even a more applied version of Texas history than many of us learned in school.

John Holland Jenkins was thirteen and a half years old when the Alamo fell in 1836 and he became a soldier of the Texas Republic under General Sam Houston.... [But] it was not until 1884, when he was past sixty years old, that he began writing down...the reminiscences that, as now put into book form, light up for whoever will read [them] the earliest days of early English-speaking Texas.-from the Foreword by J. Frank DobieThis is the firsthand account by one who measured up to the demands of danger and hardships and lived to write about it for others. For, here is history in the making-Indian raids and Mexican forays were daily menaces and brought massacres, capture and torture to these first settlers. These reminiscences...are invaluable for their recordings of early frontier times and for their presentation of such historic happenings as the Mier and Santa Fe expeditions. The original flavor of the writing has been beautifully retained and the entire account is well documented.-Library Journal

"A book about oil and water, rangers and outlaws, Anglos and Hispanics, frontier and settlement, money and power...James Michener is something rare and valuable: an honorable craftsman doing honorable work....He manages to make history vivid and palatable to the reader."THE BOSTON GLOBETexas. A land of sprawling diversity and unparalleled richness; a dazzling chapter in the history of our nation, a place like no other on earth. Through the remarkable lives of four families, this epic saga spans four centuries and two continents and charts the dramatic formation of several great dynasties from the age of the conquistadors to the present day. A richly compelling novel of a proud people eager to meet the challenge of the land, TEXAS is James Michener's most magnificent achievement.