The kings of Big Spring : God, oil, and one family's search for the American dream

Title:

Author:

Summary:

In 1892, Bryan Mealer's great-grandfather leaves the Georgia mountains and heads west into Texas, looking for wealth and adventure in the raw and open country. But his luck soon runs out. Beset by drought, the family loses their farm just as the dead pastures around them give way to one of the biggest oil booms in American history.

Edition:

First edition.

Physical Description:

369 pages : illustrations, map, genealogical tables ; 25 cm

Genre:

Biographies.

Autobiographies.

Personal Subject:

Mealer, Bryan.

Subject Term:

Petroleum industry and trade -- Biography.

Geographic Term:

Big Spring (Tex.) -- Biography.

Texas -- Biography.

Publisher:

Flatiron Books,

Publication Date:

2018

ISBN:

9781250058911

Publication Information:

New York : Flatiron Books, 2018.

Call Number:

976.4 MEALER

Holds: Copies:

Available:*

Item Barcode	Collection	Call Number	Status	Item Holds
33607003309625	Adult Nonfiction	976.4 MEALER	Searching... Unknown	Searching... Unavailable

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Summary

In the winter of 1981, Bryan Mealer's father, Bobby, receives a call from an old friend with a deviously simple question, "How'd you like to be a millionaire?" Twenty-six, and with a young family, Bobby had left his home town of Big Spring in West Texas, a town of oil booms and busts, to seek his fortune away from the legacy of black gold his forefathers had chased. But now Big Spring's streets are flooded again with money and Texas T, a boom so big that 46% of the world's oil is bubbling up from west Texas soil and a fevered American dream has taken hold as fortune hunters pour in, oil rigs sprout up like dandelions in the field, and millionaires are minted each day. Grady Cunningham, Bobby's old friend, is one of the fresh kings of Big Spring. Flashy, loud, smart as a whip and richer than sin, Grady pulls Bobby Mealer and his young wife into his glamorous orbit. There's a cushy job for Bobby as VP of Grady's oil company, weekend jaunts to the Bahamas in private jets, shopping sprees in Paris and lost weekends in New Orleans. But beneath these glittering lives is a side of life as dark as the oil which pays for it. Drugs take hold, marriages crumble, accidents happen and most importantly, wells run dry. But the story starts over a hundred years ago, when Bryan's great grandfather left Appalachia to first venture West to seek his fortune. The heartaches, the triumphs, the pain and the pleasure that accompanies the booms and subsequent busts is keenly felt and endlessly repeated. In The Kings of Big Spring, Bryan Mealer has written an indelible portrait of a family through three generations of boom and bust, and a legacy of fortune and ruin as big as Texas itself.

Author Notes

Bryan Mealer is the author of Muck City: Winning and Losing in Football's Forgotten Town, and the New York Times bestseller The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, which he wrote with William Kamkwamba. He is also the author of All Things Must Fight to Live, which chronicled his years covering the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo as a reporter for the Associated Press and Harper's. His work has appeared in the anthology Best American Travel Writing and was chosen for an Overseas Press Club Award Citation. He and his family live in Austin, Texas.

Reviews (2)

Publisher's Weekly Review

In this excellent family history, journalist Mealer (The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind) follows his Scotch-Irish forebears from the hills of northern Georgia to a distant frontier of rugged beauty, untapped resources, and devastating hardship. The saga plays out against the vast backdrop of West Texas from the 1890s through the author's youth in the 1980s as one bonanza after another is erased by boll weevil, drought, addiction, or greed. Through all the dust storms and oil gushers, through bankruptcy and epidemics, generations of Mealers chase the American dream only to see it slip through their grasps, leaving them to find solace in Christian faith and one another. Mealer brings together his disparate materials with ease. The miniature cosmos of family life is counterpointed by profiles of national figures such as Bob Wills, the founder of Western Swing, and Raymond Tollett, a polymath ex-FBI agent who turned a bankrupt refinery into a regional powerhouse. Post-WWII prosperity made the hobo camps, child mortality, and crushing poverty of the dust bowl and Depression impossibly remote, yet Mealer's narrative allows figures long frozen in black and white to walk again in living color. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Library Journal Review

Mealer (Muck City) returns to his roots in this multigenerational family saga, which transcends genres of biography and genealogy to become a panoramic social history of 20th-century Texas. He avoids romanticizing or politicizing his hardscrabble ancestors. Most women ran households and raised families; most men farmed the arid land, drilled for oil, drove trucks, or sold used cars. They eked out precarious existences among dust storms, oil booms and busts, revival meetings, and domestic tumult. But they also showed passion, tenacity, and loyalty-enough to revitalize the family saga genre, though late comedian George Carlin's quip about needing to be asleep to believe in the American Dream rings true for most of this book. In his themes and vivid storytelling, Mealer invites comparison to James Mitchener (Texas) or J.D. Vance (Hillbilly Elegy). Entertainment doubles as social history of rural, white, working-class Texans from 1982 to 2011. The stories also resonate with contemporary preoccupations of rural whites' socioeconomic distress and cognitive dissonance, particularly on matters of faith and sexuality. VERDICT As tribute to the grit of the rural poor, as social history of dirt-and-oil Texas, and as rambunctious family saga, this work triumphs. [See "Editors' Spring Picks," p. 29.]-Michael Rodriguez, Univ. of Connecticut, Storrs © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.