Thurbsday! Thurbsday! Thurbsday!

...and a Texas-sized Blurbsday.

I met Jeff Roche some twenty years ago at an academic conference on the history of conservatism, not long after he published an article called “Cowboy Conservatism,” a chapter in an anthology he co-edited with David Farber called The Conservative Sixties. He said he was working on a book on Texas conservatism. I don’t know that our paths ever crossed in the interim, nor if I had read any other of his work, when he approached me last year to tell me that book was finally coming forth, and asked if I wanted to check it out for blurb consideration. I was glad to do so, with my usual caveat: if I didn’t love it, I wouldn’t blurb it.

Reader: I loved it.

I wasn’t anywhere prepared for how stylish, well-constructed, and deeply insightful it would be: history on a grand scale, by a genuine craftsman. What I tried to convey in this endorsement is how, as with all truly delightful nonfiction, it makes itself appealing even to readers who aren’t particularly interested—or didn’t know they were interested—in the specific subject. It does what all great history does: demonstrates how something unique and new ever comes into the world. In this case, it is the creation of a society out of what previously was a wasteland, in the scrublands of West Texas, settled by barely anyone willing to give any kind of liberalism the kind of day, led by an only-in-America cadre of weirdos whose uniformly right-wing political style became shockingly influential for the rest of the country.

And, the man really knows his way around a sentence.

Here’s the blurb:

“I didn’t think I cared about how cattle drives worked in nineteenth-century West Texas. I had no inkling of how that might explain why Amarillo is presently the most right-wing city in the nation. But now I do. What this splendid book demonstrates is how, in the hands of a practitioner of style and erudition, narrative history can bridge centuries, making the connections between Then and Now feel both natural and fresh.”