Priscilla Kipp

NonfictionFood & Drink

Eat Like a Fish

Review by Priscilla Kipp

Author Bren Smith declares, “I have the heart of a fisherman and the soul of a farmer,” and in his memoir, Eat Like a Fish: My Adventures as a Fisherman Turned Restorative Ocean Farmer, he proves this to be true over and over again. Starting off on the Canadian island of Newfoundland, he passed through Massachusetts (and through its jails), climbed onto lobster boats, plied his way north again to Alaskan fisheries and finally landed on the Thimble Islands off the New England coast. The salty adolescent who loved the company of fishermen and could swig and swear with the best of them evolved into an expert ocean farmer, pioneering the “climate cuisine” industry and promising an innovative way of feeding our beleaguered planet. Take a new look at what’s for dinner: seaweed.

As Smith scales up from his 20-acre vertical ocean farm, he births an industry that must struggle to avoid the “sharks”—and mistakes—of globalized big business, and he hooks celebrity chefs like Mark Bittman and Rene Redzepi. Kelp noodles soon take center stage on the plates of upscale New York and Las Vegas restaurants, and Google starts serving them in innovative offerings in their employee cafeterias. For those who wonder about ingredients, Smith includes recipes like Shrimp Fra Diavolo with Kelp and Barbecue Kelp and Carrots, along with where to find the goods.

Smith is an articulate, very human ambassador for sustainable, ethical and environmentally beneficial mariculture, weaving his plea for changing the way we eat with solid proof of why it’s so necessary. He includes a global history here as well, spanning coastal cultures from China and Japan to Scotland and Atlantic Canada, all rich with best practices and viable traditions.

Calling for “all hands on deck” to achieve survival as climate change continues to alter our natural resources, Smith urges that we learn to eat what the ocean can grow instead of growing only what we are used to eating. He offers ways to help like cooking and fertilizing with seaweed and shellfish and supporting local “sea trusts.” And GreenWave, the company he helped found, provides an open-source farming manual for building your own kelp hatchery. If this new age of “climate cuisine” needs an introduction, Eat Like a Fish is surely it.

If this new age of “climate cuisine” needs an introduction, Eat Like a Fish is surely it.
NonfictionMemoir

The Light Years

Review by Priscilla Kipp

There is a saying: If you remember the 1960s, you must not have been there. If you were, and went on to enjoy—or survive—their segue into the ’70s, Chris Rush’s mesmerizing memoir, The Light Years, may cause some fine flashbacks. But if you know those drug-addled days only by reputation and the sounds of their haze-spawned music, Rush’s detail-laden account of his turbulent adolescence will be quite an eye-opener.

The middle child of seven in a well-off New Jersey family that knew how to party, Rush was an artistic, sexually conflicted misfit. His alcoholic father loathed him, his mother protected him, and his older sister introduced him to marijuana and LSD by the time he was 12—“sacraments,” she called them, not to be confused with heroin or cocaine, which would come later. Rush remembers his acid trips with poetic clarity. Watching an American flag-clad Frisbee player at a party, he saw “stroboscopic trails” following him, “frame by frame by frame. I began to think of the awfulness of the [Vietnam] war, of dead bodies piled in the sun. Maybe the glitter-acid was coming on a little too strong.”

After his father threatened to kill him, Rush left the private school where he was peddling drugs and followed his sister out west—California, Arizona, Idaho, Wyoming—and into the business of storing and selling drugs. Living in “stash houses” and partaking of the inventory, Rush grew to love tripping in the wild of the mountains, adding hashish to his repertoire, spending months alone and sketching his drug-fueled fantasies. He came down into the hill towns to call his mother collect, to let her know he was alive and to be cautioned not to come home. Lovers and friends along the way seemed as lost as he was.

Today a celebrated Tucson artist, Rush recounts his troubled journey not as a cautionary tale but as a testament to a time when finding a place in the real world could be life-saving. For him, it was learning to bake a pie and sharing it with a friend. For his reader, this redeeming affirmation comes as both revelation and relief.

Chris Rush’s mesmerizing memoir, The Light Years, is a detail-laden account of his turbulent adolescence in the 1960s.

Nonfiction

Mama’s Last Hug

Review by Priscilla Kipp

In 2016, the 80-year-old biologist Jan van Hooff visited his old friend Mama, a dying 59-year-old chimpanzee matriarch. Their videotaped emotional reunion was seen around the world. In Mama’s Last Hug, Frans de Waal begins with that endearing goodbye, then dives into his decades of experience studying our fellow hominids.

With wit and scholarly perspicacity, the renowned primatologist and ethologist offers an abundant study of animal and human emotions, urging a kinder, gentler approach to those with whom we share our planet, from apes and rats to plants and single-cell organisms. Citing a wealth of experiments and studies, the genial scientist raises new awareness of our shared evolutionary history and suggests that a strictly behavioral model is no longer accurate or adequate. In fact, de Waal writes, previous theoretical constructs were largely based on assumptions (made by men) about male dominance. The matriarchal society of bonobos offers a conflicting example. These primate hippies make more love than war and are pros at peacemaking. Perhaps we humans are more like them—or should be.

Chief among de Waal’s studies are animal emotions: who has them, how they work and why humans should care. De Waal provides examples of a full range of emotions experienced by our fellow hominids like empathy, sympathy, disgust, shame, guilt, fear and forgiveness. He proves that rats enjoy being tickled; chimps and elephants can console, conspire and retaliate; and plants release toxic scents to protect against predatory insects.

We are all animals, de Waal reminds us, and he has provided a rich perspective on—and an urgent invitation to reconsider—every aspect of life around us. 

In 2016, the 80-year-old biologist Jan van Hooff visited his old friend Mama, a dying 59-year-old chimpanzee matriarch. Their videotaped emotional reunion was seen around the world. In Mama’s Last Hug, Frans de Waal begins with that endearing goodbye, then dives into his decades of experience studying our fellow hominids.

NonfictionEssays

The Book of Delights

Review by Priscilla Kipp

If timing is indeed everything, what better time than now, here in deep winter, to seek—and find—solace in the delightful but often elusive moments of the everyday? In The Book of Delights, poet and avid gardener Ross Gay sets out, beginning on his 42nd birthday, to write “a daily essay about something delightful” for one year. The result: 102 essays with curiosity-provoking titles like “Tomato on Board” and “Hole in the Head.” Gay writes, “[M]y delight grows—much like love and joy—when I share it.”

Gay leads us on a merry walk through the mundane, illuminating moments of his day with intense, exquisitely detailed observations: a morning stop at a fragrant bakery; a glimpse of two strangers sharing their shopping bag handles; a grateful kiss planted on a blooming flower in his garden. He is mesmerized by the moment when the natural world meets the human eye, as when a praying mantis perches on an empty pint glass and transforms it into “a gorgeous transparent stage for this beast to perform on.”

Nor does he shy away from the reality of being black, that constant third rail embedded in our country’s history. The color of his skin shadows and illuminates his existence, causing both delight (when a “phenotypical” flight attendant calls him “Baby” and bestows him with extra pretzels) and angst (he has reason to note that “the darker your skin, the more likely you are to be ‘loitering’”).

Gay’s journey ambles back and forth in time. He feels his losses but imbues them with gratitude; people here and gone remain his delights. They are all here, stuffing this slim book with their abilities to delight the author. Yet humans are far from the only objects of Gay’s insights. Hummingbirds, cardinals, pigeons, skunks and bumblebees are all worthy of a moment’s glee, and he shares them all—delightfully, of course—with us.

If timing is indeed everything, what better time than now, here in deep winter, to seek—and find—solace in the delightful but often elusive moments of the everyday? In The Book of Delights, poet and avid gardener Ross Gay sets out, beginning on his 42nd birthday, to write “a daily essay about something delightful” for one year. The result: 102 essays with curiosity-provoking titles like “Tomato on Board” and “Hole in the Head.” Gay writes, “[M]y delight grows—much like love and joy—when I share it.”

NonfictionBiography

Little Dancer Aged Fourteen

Review by Priscilla Kipp

In 1881, Edgar Degas revealed his wax sculpture of an odd-looking young dancer at a Paris exhibition, a piece that caused controversy, revulsion and disgust among viewers. Today, Degas’ dancer is on display in the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., and it is regarded as a treasure and a breakthrough work of realistic, multidimensional art. In Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, author Camille Laurens attempts to place both the artist and the child who served as Degas’ model, Marie van Goethem, in context, yet much of the mystery surrounding them remains, haunting writer and reader alike.

Marie was born into a family of Belgian refugees, who were barely surviving in the slums of Paris. Managed by her mother, she became a “rat,” one of many young children who scurried across the dance floor in Paris Opera productions. The girls attracted the interest and desire of unscrupulous, lusty, upperclass male patrons. Paris in the 1880s had yet to address child labor protections; rehearsals and performances were grueling and often led to prostitution or, as with Marie, modeling, with its implied intimacies. Yet the work also paid better than most jobs children could physically do. At 14, Marie became a model for the eccentric, solitary Edgar Degas.

Degas’ life and art become familiar in Laurens’ detailed telling, but his relationship with Marie and her ultimate fate remain obscure. Laurens hints at many possibilities, admitting that she is haunted by this child of wax, whose insides Degas filled with the flotsam and jetsam of his cluttered studio. Comparing Marie to the tragic figure of the exploited Marilyn Monroe, who once posed next to the sculpture, and today’s Syrian child refugees working in Turkish textile factories to support their families, Laurens believes Degas sculpted “Little Dancer Aged Fourteen” to communicate that “his own present time is universal, that he projects it into all times, that he informs the future with his hands.”

In 1881, Edgar Degas revealed his wax sculpture of an odd-looking young dancer at a Paris exhibition, a piece that caused controversy, revulsion and disgust among viewers.

NonfictionBiography

Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Review by Priscilla Kipp

The 107th justice of the U.S. Supreme Court has become an unlikely icon, a tiny-but-titanic 85-year-old whom popular culture has dubbed the “Notorious RBG.” She is showcased on everything from T-shirts to comedy sketches on “Saturday Night Live.” Lest this giant of jurisprudence lose her gravitas amid such fame, Jane Sherron De Hart does a daunting job of restoring Ginsburg’s impressive roots in Ruth Bader Ginsburg: A Life. Hart’s biography is a studious walk through Ginsburg’s own keen recollections, arm and arm with explorations of many landmark cases, as well as their historical, social and political landscapes. Ginsburg’s colleagues on the Supreme Court, including the first female justice, Sandra Day O’Connor, and her fellow opera lover, the mercurial Antonin Scalia, are here as well, coloring the historical record and shedding up-close-and-personal light on the daily work of the court.

During her first year at Harvard Law School in 1956, Ginsburg was one of nine females in a class of 552, and the dean routinely asked her, “Why are you . . . taking a place that could have gone to a man?” Later, despite a stellar academic record, she had trouble landing a job. As she noted, “To be a woman, a Jew, and a mother to boot” was “a bit too much” in 1959.

By the time Ginsburg was appointed to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit by President Carter in 1980, her record of advocating for equal rights for women and men had made her a hero among feminists. Nominated to the Supreme Court in 1993 by President Clinton, she has served since as a strident voice on both liberal and conservative courts. She is known for distilling legalese into language the press and public can understand, and her opinions and dissents have buttressed groundbreaking cases that involve such issues as abortion, immigration and gender equality.

As Martin Luther King Jr. said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” De Hart leaves no doubt that, in Justice Ginsburg’s hands, that arc will undoubtedly continue to bend.

The 107th justice of the U.S. Supreme Court has become an unlikely icon, a tiny-but-titanic 85-year-old whom popular culture has dubbed the “Notorious RBG.” She is showcased on everything from T-shirts to comedy sketches on “Saturday Night Live.” Lest this giant of jurisprudence lose her gravitas amid such fame, Jane Sherron De Hart does a daunting job of restoring Ginsburg’s impressive roots in Ruth Bader Ginsburg: A Life.

NonfictionWomen's History

Pure

Review by Priscilla Kipp

Refugees from the “purity industry,” which had a heavy influence on evangelical youth in the latter years of the 20th century, may recognize themselves in Pure, Linda Kay Klein’s eye-opening study of what went wrong when strict interpretations of biblical Scripture became cultural touchstones.

In the evangelical community, sexual shaming and a focus on purity were used to promote strict sexual abstinence before marriage, especially for girls. Girls raised within this culture knew little about their own sexualities and were discouraged by parents and pastors from questioning the biases of their gender roles. If boys were tempted by a girl, or even if she was raped, it was her fault: She became a “stumbling block,” and her body became a shameful inspiration toward sin. If a woman managed to save herself for marriage, she was expected to know how to fulfill her husband’s desires, and if she could not and he left or committed adultery, this was also her fault; she had failed to satisfy him in her wifely duties. 

Klein experienced all of this firsthand, and she bears the scars. She was raised in this culture but began to question its focus on female sexual purity when a youth pastor in her church was convicted of sexual enticement of a child. Klein has since spent years interviewing many women about their church experiences, and their accounts are strikingly similar, graphic and disturbing. The “nightmares, panic attacks, and paranoia” they suffered amounted to symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder: “We went to war with ourselves, our own bodies, and our own sexual natures, all under the strict commandment of the church.” For many, the results were, and continue to be, devastating.

Klein’s research supporting the need for reform is compelling, and she makes it clear that sexism and sexual shame directed toward women and young girls are endemic in our society. Today, more enlightened and inclusive church communities are led by youth pastors who are comfortable exploring the larger issue of sexual ethics and decision-making. For those who seek spiritual community without gender bias, Klein offers empathy and new choices. 

Refugees from the “purity industry,” which had a heavy influence on evangelical youth in the latter years of the 20th century, may recognize themselves in Pure, Linda Kay Klein’s eye-opening study of what went wrong when strict interpretations of biblical scripture became cultural touchstones.

NonfictionHistory

The unsung pioneers of aviation

Review by Priscilla Kipp

The thrills of air racing, so popular in the 1920s and ’30s, are now mostly forgotten, along with the names of the aviators who risked their lives for huge crowds, three-foot trophies and, of course, the cash prizes. Lost with them was the story of the “Powder Puffs,” women who defied the time’s rampant gender discrimination and triumphed in (or plummeted from) the sky. Of these pioneer breakers of the ultimate glass ceiling, perhaps only one name has stayed familiar: the beloved and doomed Amelia Earhart. Keith O’Brien’s spectacularly detailed Fly Girls: How Five Daring Women Defied All Odds and Made Aviation History changes all that, re-creating a world that can still inspire us today.

Meet Louise Thaden, a married mother of two; Ruth Elder, a beautiful Alabama divorcée; Ruth Nichols, a woman unhappily born into wealth; and Florence Klingensmith, whose promising aviation career ended in tragedy. True resisters, they were empowered by their recently gained right to vote and inspired by aviation’s rising popularity. Charles Lindbergh’s recent solo trans-Atlantic flight in 1927 was an achievement that begged for a female challenger, and it had one soon enough.

O’Brien keeps a sharp eye on the planes as well. The flimsily built early aircraft regularly lost their wings, shed their wheels and exploded in flames, sometimes miraculously leaving their pilots alive and eager to fly again. Men found financial support—and better planes—much easier to come by than women, who routinely faced reporters asking why they weren’t at home cooking dinner. Elder and Klingensmith tried to dodge the husband question, while Earhart allowed her husband, prominent New York publisher George P. Putnam, to be her relentless PR man who “probably saved her from becoming a nice old maid.”

The women of aviation were “friendly enemies,” competing for speed and distance records while supporting each other on the ground and in the air. Known collectively as the Ninety Nines, they encouraged young women to aim high. As Earhart said, a woman’s place “is wherever her individual aptitude places her.”

 

This article was originally published in the August 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The thrills of air racing, so popular in the 1920s and ’30s, are now mostly forgotten, along with the names of the aviators who risked their lives for huge crowds, three-foot trophies and, of course, the cash prizes. Lost with them was the story of the “Powder Puffs,” women who defied the time’s rampant gender discrimination and triumphed in (or plummeted from) the sky. Of these pioneer breakers of the ultimate glass ceiling, perhaps only one name has stayed familiar: the beloved and doomed Amelia Earhart. Keith O’Brien’s spectacularly detailed Fly Girls: How Five Daring Women Defied All Odds and Made Aviation History changes all that, re-creating a world that can still inspire us today.

NonfictionNature

Gentle giants of the sea

Review by Priscilla Kipp

When a paleontologist writing about whales begins by quoting naturalist Henry Beston—“They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time”—you know you are in for a wondrous read. And Spying on Whales: The Past, Present, and Future of Earth’s Most Awesome Creatures by Nick Pyenson is indeed that.

Pyenson is the curator of marine mammal fossils for the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History, and here he recounts discovering the fossils of whales’ ancestors and following today’s whales with tracking technology. He reveals evidence-based predictions about the future of whales, and his obvious passion for these magnificent creatures makes the scientific research enthralling. Readers learn that whales once walked on land (yes, with feet), blue whales were not always giants, and killer whales sometimes travel in packs, like wolves. Pyenson’s enthusiasm is contagious.

Pyenson confesses that “whales aren’t my destination: they are the gateway to a journey of discovery, across oceans and through time,” and he excels in taking his reader along on this journey.

The Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft carry whale-song recordings as greetings to alien life-forms, although their meanings are yet to be understood. Despite all that humans have learned about whales, these sounds remain as mysterious as their makers.

 

This article was originally published in the July 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

When a paleontologist writing about whales begins by quoting naturalist Henry Beston—“They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time”—you know you are in for a wondrous read. And Spying on Whales: The Past, Present, and Future of Earth’s Most Awesome Creatures by Nick Pyenson is indeed that.

NonfictionHistoryAmerican History

The human stories behind a natural disaster

Review by Priscilla Kipp

Al Roker, co-host and weather anchor of NBC’s “Today,” vividly re-creates the tragedy of the Johnstown Flood in Ruthless Tide. In what he calls an “unnatural disaster,” 20 million tons of water hurtled past a failing dam and into a Pennsylvania valley on the afternoon of May 31, 1889, tossing animals and trees, crushing houses and killing 2,209 men, women and children. By supplying plenty of detail, Roker brings the reader so deeply into the moment (it took about 10 seconds for most of Johnstown to be utterly destroyed) that you can almost hear the water’s roar and feel the thundering crashes as rooftops and locomotives banged into buildings ripped from their foundations.

Roker makes it clear that this disaster was created by humans. A frequent recreational retreat for wealthy members, the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club in Pennsylvania resisted any local concerns about the club’s dam, which was built to create a private lake. Stocking the lake with premium fish was more important than relieving water flow. Landscapes were deforested in the name of industry, but without trees, the hillsides had no resistance against flooding. Worries were ignored, warnings went unheeded, and bad decisions trumped the advice of those who knew better.

Today, one may think we are environmentally aware enough to ensure that such a catastrophe could never happen again. But one must ask if any lessons have been learned. Consider, for example, the levees and Hurricane Katrina—and remember the Johnstown Flood.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our Q&A with Al Roker about Ruthless Tide.

This article was originally published in the June 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Al Roker, co-host and weather anchor of NBC’s “Today,” vividly re-creates the tragedy of the Johnstown Flood in Ruthless Tide. In what he calls an “unnatural disaster,” 20 million tons of water hurtled past a failing dam and into a Pennsylvania valley on the afternoon of May 31, 1889, tossing animals and trees, crushing houses and killing 2,209 men, women and children. By supplying plenty of detail, Roker brings the reader so deeply into the moment (it took about 10 seconds for most of Johnstown to be utterly destroyed) that you can almost hear the water’s roar and feel the thundering crashes as rooftops and locomotives banged into buildings ripped from their foundations.

NonfictionEssays

Looking back on a life spent in transit

Review by Priscilla Kipp

From The Great Railway Bazaar (1975) to The Tao of Travel (2011), Paul Theroux has taught us how to travel: intently, adventurously and lightly.

While the title may suggest a single painting, the 30 essays included here are alive with locales as varied as Theroux’s many journeys. He is a collector of experiences with the famous and infamous, the familiar and the exotic, the literati and the little guys. There’s a helicopter flight over Neverland Ranch with Elizabeth Taylor as she discusses her Peter Pan and Wendy-esque friendship with Michael Jackson. Walks with Robin Williams and Oliver Sacks reveal their inspiring humanity. A dominatrix explains everything. Hunter S. Thompson is remembered for his writing and demons, “familiar, because they are our demons, most of them anyway.”

Theroux gets around the globe as well, whether searching for a fabled drug high in Ecuador, residing in England for 18 years, rediscovering Vietnam or paddling around in Hawaii.

Having been everywhere and done almost everything, Theroux concludes Figures in a Landscape closer to home, examining his childhood and parents with the circumspection of a worldly-wise adult. Yet his insatiable curiosity continues, and he wonders what his own legacy should be. For Theroux, the idea of leaving no trace has never been an option.

 

This article was originally published in the May 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

From The Great Railway Bazaar (1975) to The Tao of Travel (2011), Paul Theroux has taught us how to travel: intently, adventurously and lightly.

NonfictionHistory

Two historic voyages

Review by Priscilla Kipp

Separated by 227 years, two men paddled up the longest river in Canada, one in search of the elusive Northwest Passage, the other wondering why he had never heard of that man’s earlier journey. In 1789, Scotsman Alexander Mackenzie mapped out his journey along the river that would one day bear his name, planning to bring along fellow fur traders, indigenous guides and plenty of pemmican, a condensed food composed of protein, fat and dried fruit. He followed the river through Canada’s vast Northwest Territories, but could not find the mythical shortcut to China and Russia that would have aided global trade. In 2016, Brian Castner, writer and certified river guide, took the same trip with a GPS, paper topographical maps, one fellow paddler for each stretch of his 1,125-mile journey—and plenty of pemmican. Their stories are skillfully intertwined in Castner’s thoroughly intriguing and enlightening Disappointment River: Finding and Losing the Northwest Passage.

The Mackenzie River—or the Deh Cho, or the Nagwichoonjik, or the Kuukpak, variously—is the second-longest river in North America, after the Mississippi. Threading north from the Great Slave Lake to the Beaufort Sea and the Arctic Ocean, it traverses “one of the last places on earth unmapped by Google Street View.”

Both Castner and Mackenzie grappled constantly with biting flies so big they’re called bulldogs, swarms of ravenous mosquitoes, perilous rapids and fierce summer weather. The isolated indigenous tribes they met along the way were sometimes helpful, often wary and always on the verge of change, both natural and man-made. Neither man’s journey went as expected. Both were dismayed by what they learned.

Mackenzie believed the river led to the Northwest Passage, but he was 200 years too early: The Arctic Ocean during his journey was an impenetrable frozen sea. He had failed. Castner, arriving at the same spot, found fast-melting polar ice. Pipelines and oil-rigs may soon further transform both the culture and land of the First Nations people. For anyone concerned with the global effects of climate change, the meaning behind Disappointment River becomes alarmingly clear.

 

This article was originally published in the March 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Separated by 227 years, two men paddled up the longest river in Canada, one in search of the elusive Northwest Passage, the other wondering why he had never heard of that man’s earlier journey.

NonfictionMemoir

Saga of a Texan family

Review by Priscilla Kipp

When John Lewis Mealer set out from the hollows of the Georgia Blue Ridge in 1892, it was to escape warring moonshiners and lawmen, and to find work in the exploding, inviting West. Young, unmarried and intent on making something of himself, he wanted a fresh start. Almost a century later, John’s grandson and author Bryan Mealer’s father, Bobby, left his steady but dead-end job at a chemical plant near Houston for the oil booms and busts of Big Spring, Texas, taking a big chance on oil with his mercurial cousin Grady. Married and the father of three, Bobby too was looking for a fresh start.

In between these familiar quests rolled a near-century full of heroes and heartbreaks, world wars and depressions, dust storms, droughts and drugs—all rigorously described in this sprawl of a story that entwines family and global history. God, like Texas oil, was a constant threat or promise; church was as all encompassing—and sometimes oppressive—as family. The Mealer men were wannabe kings, hoping to claim the throne that an oil boom promised—or to at least own their own land.

The Kings of Big Spring is a family tree that offers no shade for its errant members. Violent, luckless husbands; unfaithful, hapless wives; and abandoned, wayward children are plentiful here. Their tales are told with the straightforwardness of a seasoned journalist, though Mealer seems justifiably wary of some of them. Like the Mealers, Big Spring crashed and reinvented itself, again and again. Weather was an endless cycle of killing winds. Pestilence was a curse. The economy was dependent on vulnerable crops and volatile markets. Oil helped to power two world wars and the Korean conflict, then transformed itself via petrochemicals.

Mealer says of his family, “We drew our strength from the power of our own flesh and blood.” The same could be said of Texas history, then and now.

When John Lewis Mealer set out from the hollows of the Georgia Blue Ridge in 1892, it was to escape warring moonshiners and lawmen, and to find work in the exploding, inviting West. Young, unmarried and intent on making something of himself, he wanted a fresh start. Almost a century later, John’s grandson and author Bryan Mealer’s father, Bobby, left his steady but dead-end job at a chemical plant near Houston for the oil booms and busts of Big Spring, Texas, taking a big chance on oil with his mercurial cousin Grady. Married and the father of three, Bobby too was looking for a fresh start.

Sign Up

Stay on top of new releases: Sign up for our newsletter to receive reading recommendations in your favorite genres.

Sign up now

Trending Features

All Features