As a memoir, ONE RANGER (UT Press) is all over the map, but, oh, the places you’ll go in this collection of anecdotes from retired Texas Ranger H. JOAQUIN JACKSON, with DAVID MARION WILKINSON. Jackson serves as a folksy but savvy tour guide to a career that stretched from 1966 to 1993 and from a prison riot shoot-out at Carrizo Springs to a horrific homicide in Big Bend’s Colorado Canyon, with countless stops in between. Jackson painstakingly argues that he’s simply telling “one ranger’s” story from his personal perspective. But the writing smacks of the truths that are hard-won from a lifetime of dealing out justice—sometimes on horseback, like the Lone Ranger used to do—in a lonesome terrain where your word is only as good as the gun and the reputation that back it up.
