Mr. White told his own story a few years ago in the Autobiography of a Durable Sinner. Still unregenerated, he now gives us the story of his native state, not a dry-as-dust and conventional history of that most unconventional of states, but a story of the Texans the ones who made their state great rather than the story of its politicians, who have sometimes succeeded in making it ridiculous'. "Texas," says Mr. White, "is one of God's greatest and most gratifying experiments. When God created Texas He did so with the mischievous intention of providing men who had no fear of Him, if only they could conquer it, with an empire of their own of stupendous wealth and unbounded opportunity. Thus Texas was his challenge to the tall, the tough, and the ugly to come and get it. They came and they got it. . . not just a few of them who have sat in high places - conquered Texas and made it over to suit their own tastes. They did it handsomely with long rifles and Bowie knives; mustangs and longhorns; lassos and branding irons; whiskey. cards, women, shooters; corn cotton, and barbed wire; books and Bibles; school and churches; sawmills; sugar mills, and gin Mills; oil drills and oil refineries. These were their tools, and with them they not only gave Texas its tradition, its culture, its costume, its manner of speech, its swagger, and its reputation, but also made it the most powerful, most envied, and most emulated state in the American Union." Mr. White writes with gusto, with such a store of Texas knowledge and legend as probably no other writer possesses, and with a keen sense of the ridiculous. He knows his Texans from the ground up, and his tale is made vivid not by the men who were elected to office or who acted as spokesmen and leaders but by the men who I did the job of making Texas what it came to be. - from Amzon