{"id":1133,"date":"2018-12-31T15:51:22","date_gmt":"2018-12-31T15:51:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/?p=1133"},"modified":"2018-12-31T15:51:22","modified_gmt":"2018-12-31T15:51:22","slug":"lone-star-book-reviewsby-michelle-newby-nbcccontributing-editor-117","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/?p=1133","title":{"rendered":"Lone Star Book ReviewsBy Michelle Newby, NBCCContributing Editor"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/span>Michelle Newby<\/span> is a reviewer for Kirkus Reviews<\/span> and Foreword Reviews, <\/span>writer, blogger at TexasBookLover.com, member of the Permian Basin Writers’ Workshop advisory committee, and a moderator for the Texas Book Festival. Her reviews appear in Pleiades Magazine, Rain Taxi, Concho River Review, Mosaic Literary Magazine, Atticus Review, The Rumpus, PANK Magazine,<\/span> and The Collagist.<\/span><\/p>\n

Lone Star Book Reviews
of Texas books appear weekly
at LoneStarLiterary.com<\/a><\/span><\/h1>\n
\n
\n

ROGER D. HODGE<\/span> is deputy editor of The Intercept<\/span> and author of The Mendacity of Hope: Barack Obama and the Betrayal of American Liberalism.<\/span> Formerly he was the editor of the Oxford American<\/span> and Harper\u2019s Magazine.<\/span> Hodge\u2019s writings have appeared in many publications, including Texas Monthly,<\/span> the London Review of Books, Popular Science, <\/span>The New Republic,<\/span> and Harper\u2019s.<\/span> His essay \u201cBlood and Time: Cormac McCarthy and the Twilight of the West\u201d was a finalist for the National Magazine Award for criticism. He lives in Brooklyn.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\n

<\/p>\n
<\/div>\n

<\/a><\/span>11.19.2017<\/h1>\n

TEXAS HISTORY\/BIOGRAPHY<\/p>\n

Roger D. Hodge<\/span><\/p>\n

Texas Blood: Seven Generations Among the Outlaws, Ranchers, Indians, Missionaries, Soldiers, and Smugglers of the Borderlands<\/span><\/p>\n

Alfred A. Knopf<\/p>\n

Hardcover, 978-0-3079-6140-2 (also available as an e-book and an audiobook), 368 pgs., $28.95<\/p>\n

October 10, 2017<\/p>\n

Texas, with its expanses of still-wild vistas, lends itself to the mythical.<\/span> Historical attempts to settle and tame the borderlands have often proved ephemeral. The evidence is found in pictographs and petroglyphs (\u201cNorth America\u2019s oldest surviving books\u201d) throughout the Trans-Pecos. But Rodger D. Hodge\u2019s<\/span> family, arriving in the Devils River country in the second half of the nineteenth century, settled and stayed. Why? Why this land? What possessed them to choose such a forbidding landscape, which remains \u201cfantastically inaccessible,\u201d on which to stake their future, working Brangus cattle, Rambouillet sheep, and Angora goats?<\/p>\n

When he was named editor of Harper\u2019s Magazine<\/span> in 2006, Hodge was surprised to be described as a \u201cTexan\u201d by a New York Times<\/span> reporter. \u201cI never expected to be a professional Texan,\u201d he writes, \u201cone of those writers who wear the lone star like a brand.\u201d Who am I? How does the place you are from shape you? Why did Hodge\u2019s ancestors come to Texas? He seems to be trying to make his peace with something, but we\u2019re never quite sure what.<\/p>\n

Texas Blood: Seven Generations Among the Outlaws, Ranchers, Indians, Missionaries, Soldiers, and Smugglers of the Borderlands,<\/span> the latest nonfiction from The Intercept\u2019s<\/span> Hodge, is a combination of journalism and memoir, producing an expansive\u2014almost panoramic\u2014history of Texas viewed through the lens of Hodge family history. The story of his family is a microcosm of the settlement of the American West.<\/p>\n

Needing more than \u201cepic histories sweep[ing] high above the hard ground of lived experience,\u201d through six states and fifteen Texas counties, Hodge drives in the footsteps of his predecessors, beginning in Missouri, following the Osage Trace to Texas. Having no primary source from his relatives, Hodge employs a Washington Irving<\/span> (who met Sam Houston<\/span>) account of his travels on the road to Texas, and Frederick Law Olmsted\u2019s<\/span> account of his travels through Texas, to illuminate the Hodge pioneer journey.<\/p>\n

Enhanced by maps and photographs, especially an arresting cover photo of a cloud-to-ground lightning strike in the West Texas mountains lighting up a field of wooden crosses in the foreground, Texas Blood<\/span> is often mesmerizing, intermittently overwrought, always evocative. Hodge is capable of the lyrical (\u201cthe stream turbulent, rapid, pink with mud and minerals, alkaline and briny, searching for the crossing\u201d), though his is an unsentimental journey. Sometimes terse, sometimes voluble, Hodge can drip with derision (\u201cQuakers and German liberals and utopian Frenchmen and Poles who sought to create a New Jerusalem but instead simply added to the entrepreneurial energies of Dallas\u201d), as well as inspire, as in the title of the first chapter, \u201cSouthwest Toward Home,\u201d with its nod to Willie Morris\u2019s<\/span> North Toward Home.<\/span><\/p>\n

Though it can be frustrating and ends abruptly, feeling unfinished, Texas Blood<\/span> is a remarkable synthesis of the general and the personal, the concrete and the metaphysical.<\/p>\n

* * * * *<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Michelle Newby is a reviewer for Kirkus Reviews and Foreword Reviews, writer, blogger at TexasBookLover.com, member of the Permian Basin Writers’ Workshop advisory committee, and a moderator for the Texas Book Festival. Her reviews appear in Pleiades Magazine, Rain Taxi, Concho River Review, Mosaic Literary Magazine, Atticus Review, The Rumpus, PANK Magazine, and The Collagist. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1133","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1133","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1133"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1133\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1133"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1133"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1133"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}