Contributing Editor
HISTORY / POLITICS
Building the Great Society: Inside Lyndon Johnson’s White House
Joshua Zeitz
Viking
Hardcover, 978-0-525-42878-7, 400 pages, $30.00 (also available in paperback, audiobook, and ebook formats)
January 2018
Reviewed by Si Dunn
Trump and the Republican Party keep saying they want to “unwind” Barack Obama’s political legacy. Yet what’s also under threat are major achievements of the Lyndon Baines Johnson administration, according to historian Joshua Zeitz in this important, informative new book, Building the Great Society.
Zeitz writes: “It was no small accomplishment to secure passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It was another matter entirely to have it mean something — to leverage the full weight of the federal government to desegregate public and private institutions peacefully throughout one-third of the United States.”
The author also notes that “[p]ersuading Congress to enact a steady profusion of liberal initiatives was a crowning achievement…. [F]ew presidents have left in place so sweeping a list of positive domestic achievements.” >>READ MORE
Texas ReadsGlenn Dromgoole
>> archive
Interesting lives: interesting books
Glenn Patterson believed in hard work and fair play and built his Snyder oil drilling company on those principles, writes his son, T.M. “Roe” Patterson, in Crude Blessings: The Amazing Life Story of Glenn Patterson, American Oilman ($24.95 hardcover).
Patterson’s brother-in-law, company co-founder Cloyce Talbott, commends the book to “any CEO who wants to learn how it is possible to survive multiple financial crises, deal with the danger of bankruptcy, and in the end become one of the most financially stable companies in existence.”
Author Patterson says his father “was honest to a fault and hated a cheater or a liar. He measured people by their heart and their integrity. He was nice to everyone, even his competitors.”
Patterson and Talbott rode the waves of boom and bust in the oil business for nearly thirty years, beginning in 1977, using the down times to purchase more drilling rigs at bargain prices in anticipation of the next boom. Patterson Drilling (eventually Patterson-UTI Energy) would grow from one rig to nearly 400 by the time Glenn retired in 2006.
Roe Patterson tells his father’s story in a lively, easy-to-read style, concluding with Glenn’s struggles with early onset Alzheimer’s and his late-in-life Christian conversion and baptism. Glenn Patterson died in 2015, and Roe is dedicating part of the proceeds from the book to Alzheimer’s support and research.
Twin sisters: Identical twins Roberta and Rogene Faulkner were born in Breckenridge, Texas, in 1933, graduated from TCU with double majors in chemistry and biology, won Fulbright Scholarships to Germany, earned advanced degrees from the University of Texas, enjoyed careers in teaching and research that allowed them to travel extensively abroad, and married and raised families as well, each bearing four children.
Now 85, Roberta Sund and Rogene Henderson tell their remarkable story in impressive (but not laborious) detail in Roberta and Rogene: The Intrepid Faulkner Twins from Texas (TCU Press, $32.95 hardcover).
“Who would imagine,” they write, “that two little girls from a small town in West Texas would experience lives of such travel and adventure, mingling not only with ordinary folk but with royalty, rubes, and rulers, teaching and consulting around the world, and making significant contributions to environmental health.”
One humorous note was that, growing up, the twins could not pronounce the letter r. So when asked their names, they would say “Whoa Gene” and “Whoa Butta.” Obviously, they grew out of it.
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Glenn Dromgoole writes about Texas books and authors. Contact him at g.dromgoole@suddenlink.net.
>> Check out his previous Texas Reads columns in Lone Star Literary Life
Crown Publishing Group
Hardcover, 978-0-8041-3800-0 (also available as an e-book and audio-book), 336 pgs., $27.00
August 7, 2018
“The medical and engineering professions were like a couple who were profoundly ill-suited for each other but determined to work together for the sake of the children.”
Heart disease is the number one killer on the planet. It is the leading cause of death of both men and women in the United States, killing approximately 610,000 people in 2017 — one in every four deaths. Approximately twenty-six million Americans have heart disease; 2,150 of them die each day, an average of one death every forty seconds. The solution of choice is a heart transplant, but in any given year there are 2,500 hearts available for 50,000 patients on the waiting list. These are bad odds; and “the person who comes up with a way to replace a failing heart with an artificial one will save countless lives and change the future of humankind.” We are talking another Louis Pasteur, Jonas Salk, or Marie Curie. And, of course, whoever crosses the finish line first will become wealthy beyond most people’s wildest dreams.
Ticker: The Quest to Create an Artificial Heart is the second book from Texas journalist royalty Mimi Swartz. Texans have read her work for decades in Texas Monthly, where she is an executive editor. Swartz’s National Magazine Award–winning work appears in the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Esquire, Slate, and the New York Times. In Ticker, she has impeccably woven science, history, biography, and engineering to create an improbably true account of cardiology’s pursuit of medicine’s Holy Grail — a fully implantable artificial heart. >>READ MORE
Amaya Books
Paperback, 978-0-9993-9810-4 (also available as an e-book), 320 pgs., $16.89
November 21, 2017
“It is true that America is a land of opportunity.” —Jolie, Democratic Republic of Congo
I volunteered a few years ago as a family mentor with the International Rescue Committee (IRC), which was born in 1933 “at the call of Albert Einstein.” I had returned from a vacation in Jordan, where I had seen the United Nations’ refugee camps for Syrians. Jordan is a tiny country with a total population of fewer than ten million people, yet it hosts three refugee camps and 740,160 refugees, the second largest proportion of refugees to population in the world.
When I returned to Texas, I did some research. At that time the number of displaced people on the planet was estimated to be a staggering sixty-five million. I was horrified by the number. During my poking about the internet for more information, I came across the IRC’s office in Abilene, Texas. I had no idea there was an opportunity so close to my West Texas home where real differences were made in the lives of the world’s most vulnerable populations. After I applied to volunteer and passed the background check, I attended orientation and met my assigned family, refugees from Rwanda.
“What I am seeing in this country is that people take care of themselves; Americans are really independent. The IRC [trains] us in that spirit, too.” —Ellie, Rwanda
Ten Cultures, Twenty Lives: Refugee Life Stories is the first book published in the United States by Daina Jurika-Owen, PhD, a folklorist and former refugee resettlement worker with the IRC’s Abilene office. >>READ MORE
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