All posts by Michael Ennis
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Los Miserables
Three academics plumb the rags-to-rags stories that have long been excluded from our state mythology.
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All the Way With LBJ
As five new books make clear, our thirty-sixth president refuses to be consigned to the dustbin of history.
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Ich Bin ein Texan
A 181-year-old book reminds us that Texas was once much more German—and far more radical—than we realize.
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The White Stuff
The secret history of cotton, the crop that transformed the global economy—and kept Texans in poverty for generations.
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Small in the Saddle
Larry McMurtry, Bill Wittliff, and Jeff Guinn turn to familiar turf—the Old West—to challenge old-school readers.
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Dallas Flambé
With its tight prose, waitress heroine, and stinging insight into urban life, Merritt Tierce’s debut marks an exciting turn in Texas literature.
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Race and Relations
Journalist Chris Tomlinson delves into the parallel histories of two Texas families with the same last name—one black, one white.
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The Rough Guide to Frackistan
Energy reporter Russell Gold gives us a reason to give a frak about fracking.
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The Rough Guide to Frackistan
Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, should rank alongside the smartphone as this young century’s most transformative technology. Over the past decade, so much oil and gas has been unlocked from previously impervious rock that America’s generation-long energy crisis has all but ended. Instead of a crippling strategic vulnerability—dependence on foreign oil—we now have a potentially exportable …
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Coming to Our Census
Former state demographer Steve H. Murdock is back, with a book that should be required reading for all 26,060,796 of us.