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The Kings of Big Spring: God, Oil, and One Family's Search for the American Dream Kindle Edition
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"Think of it as a Texas version of Hillbilly Elegy."
— Bryan Burrough, New York Times bestselling author of THE BIG RICH and BARBARIANS AT THE GATE
"Bryan Mealer has given us a brilliant, and brilliantly entertaining, portrayal of family, and a bursting-at-the-seams chunk of America in the bargain.”
— Ben Fountain, bestselling author of Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
A saga of family, fortune, faith in Texas, where blood is bond and oil is king…
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. They eventually settle in the small town of Big Spring, where fast fortunes are being made from its own reserves of oil. For the next two generations, the Mealers live on the margins of poverty, laboring in the cotton fields and on the drilling rigs that sprout along the flatland, weathering dust and wind, booms and busts, and tragedies that scatter them like tumbleweed. After embracing Pentecostalism during the Great Depression, they rely heavily on their faith to steel them against hardship and despair. But for young Bobby Mealer, the author’s father, religion is only an agent for rebellion.
In the winter of 1981, when the author is seven years old, Bobby receives a call from an old friend with a simple question, “How'd you like to be a millionaire?”
Twenty-six, and with a wife and three kids, Bobby had left his hometown to seek a life removed from the blowing dust and oil fields, and to find spiritual peace. But now Big Spring’s streets are flooded again with roughnecks, money, and sin. Boom chasers pour in from the busted factory towns in the north. Drilling rigs rise like timber along the pastures, and poor men become millionaires overnight.
Grady Cunningham, Bobby's friend, is one of the newly-minted kings of Big Spring. Loud and flamboyant, with a penchant for floor-length fur coats, Grady pulls Bobby and his young wife into his glamorous orbit. While drilling wells for Grady's oil company, they fly around on private jets and embrace the honky-tonk high life of Texas oilmen. But beneath the Rolexes and Rolls Royce cars is a reality as dark as the crude itself. As Bobby soon discovers, his return to Big Spring is a backslider’s journey into a spiritual wilderness, and one that could cost him his life.
A masterwork of memoir and narrative history, The Kings of Big Spring is an indelible portrait of fortune and ruin as big as Texas itself. And in telling the story of four generations of his family, Mealer also tells the story of America came to be.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherFlatiron Books
- Publication dateFebruary 6, 2018
- File size4767 KB
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"The Kings of Big Spring tears like a flaming roller-coaster through four generations of a Texas family that's lived it all, from hardscrabble farms and tarpaper shacks to the crazy-making highs of oil booms and big money, with gobs of love, lust, heartache, and Jesus along the way. Bryan Mealer has given us a brilliant, and brilliantly entertaining, portrayal of family, and a bursting-at-the-seams chunk of America in the bargain."
-- Ben Fountain, New York Times bestselling author of Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
"Mealer has pulled off something downright remarkable here. On one level, he has penned a sweeping multigenerational family chronicle that can be read as a history of Texas and, by natural extension, of the American experience. But it's more than even that. In the small twists of fate and nature that buffet the extended Lewis-Mealer clan are reminders of the profound capriciousness of life, of how something as simple as a rain that doesn't come - or a weevil that does - can alter a family's fortunes forever. Masterful and deeply thought-provoking."
--Scott Anderson, author of the New York Times bestselling Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East
"THE KINGS OF BIG SPRING is the kind of epic tale we rarely see, the sprawling, multi-generation story of a single, hardscrabble working-class family, scrapping and clawing its way through dust storms, droughts and oilfields in its quest for a sliver of the American Dream. At a time when the national spotlight is rediscovering the plight of Middle American families, this book will never be more relevant. Think of it as a Texas version of Hillbilly Elegy.''
-- Bryan Burrough, New York Times bestselling author of THE BIG RICH and BARBARIANS AT THE GATE
"In The Kings of Big Spring Bryan Mealer has written a mutigenerational saga as broad as the Texas landscape that forms its backdrop. With poignancy and warmth, Mealer's memoir traces his family from Appalachian hollows to the open ranges of the West. During hardscrabble years, they suffer through droughts, depression, and dust bowl years with tenacity, faith, and more than a bit of luck, and when their fortunes rise during the oil boom, their newfound wealth catapults them into a fleeting jet set lifestyle. At once heartbreaking and exhilarating, The Kings of Big Spring brings to life one family's quest for the American Dream with a Texas twist."
-Jennifer Gromada, Labyrinth Books (Princeton, NJ)
"Bryan Mealer incorporates extensive research presenting the story of his family while showcasing the history of West Texas during the Twentieth Century. The Kings of Big Spring portrays the oil industry, through both the good and bad years, wrapped in an intriguing saga spanning several generations of Texans."
Martha Jarred, Henderson Book Store, owner
"The Kings of Big Spring is the manual laborers' view of 20th century Texas economic
history -- a tour de force unlike any Texas history I've ever read. Mealer
reminds me of Carl Sandburg, Howard Zinn and John Steinbeck all rolled into one.
-- Erwin McGee, Balcones Books (Austin, TX)
"While this engrossing memoir is set in Texas for the most part, it is truly an American tale for everyone. From the first Europeans who set out for the New World, families have moved westward (or northward) for economic opportunities. The Mealers are one of these families. This is a wonderful story about a working class family in the 20th century. Highly recommended"
--Valerie Koehler, Blue Willow Bookshop
"If everything isbigger in Texas then so too is Texans' resilience, that ability to musclethrough the cycles of boom and bust that seem inherent in the state's DNA.Bryan Mealer brings the mythical stature of twentieth century Texans to lifewith this history of four generations of his family. Theirs is a story ofpoverty and prayer; oil discoveries and ostentation--big personalities wholive hard and take whatever fate delivers, with little regard for pastmisfortune or future uncertainty. Mealer's fascinating chronicle feels rippedfrom the pages of a Faulkner novel: colorful folks with ambition and egos as big asthe Texas sky who, when the bottom falls out, curse their fate, seek the salveof redemption, and then simply move on."
--Laurie Feathers, Interabang Books (Dallas, TX)
About the Author
Product details
- ASIN : B073TSF19X
- Publisher : Flatiron Books (February 6, 2018)
- Publication date : February 6, 2018
- Language : English
- File size : 4767 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 368 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #291,910 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Bryan Mealer is the author of The Kings of Big Spring, Muck City and the New York Times bestseller The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind – written with William Kamkwamba. – which has been translated into more than a dozen languages and will soon be released as a major motion picture. He’s also the author of All Things Must Fight to Live, which chronicled his years covering the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo for the Associated Press and Harper’s. His other work has appeared in Texas Monthly, Esquire, the Guardian, and the New York Times. Mealer and his family live in Austin.
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Mealer's book has been compared to "Hillbilly Elegy", by JD Vance, but it really isn't like Vance's book. Though both tell the story of a family and it's background, from poor working class to relative middle class, Vance's book is written with a seemingly self-conscience look at his kin and from where they sprang. He knows quite well the long pull he made to move up in society through study and hard work. After reading Vance's book, I wondered if he would stay in touch with his family as he grew out of their milieu. But this review isn't about JD Vance's good book, it's about Bryan Mealer's.
Bryan Mealer's ancestors took the long trip in the early 1900's from the "hollers" of Appalachia to Texas for the same reason thousands of others set off - a search for the "good life". What they found was a hard and often difficult existence, where making a living had as much to do with weather and its vagueries as it did with a person's hard work. The winds came, the dust blew, and the Mealers often left Texas and headed further west to California. But they mostly seemed to return to Texas, and in particular, to Big Spring in the Permian Basin. It was in Big Spring and the oil towns of Midland and Odessa where the Mealers and their extended family lived and died. worked and prayed. And, at times, they drank and gambled. They raised their families and contributed to their communities. Though no Mealer ever struck it huge in the "oil bidness", Mealer's father was associated with a Texas-special guy, Grady Cunningham, who lived large and some of that largess fell on to Bobby Mealer and his family.
Bryan Mealer is an incredibly good writer. I'd never read his previous books and picked this book up because of the subject. He writes movingly and totally without judgement on his family. That's how Mealer's book is different from Vance's. Mealer writes lovingly about his family -warts and all - while there's always a whiff of judgement in Vance's book. This book is one of the best works of non-fiction I’ve read in the past few years.
I know this to be true because I am a product of Forsan and Big Spring and proud of my heritage.
The author chronicled the history of the land and his family saga with a knowledge and love similar only to that of a mother's love and reaffirms the truth that "you can go home again". The reader need not be native to Big Spring or West Texas to relate to that universal theme or to the comfort of Faith when times are hard or success unparalleled.
Mr. Mealer crafted his sweeping autobiographical story with the depth and breadth of an epic novel. The historical accuracy is well researched. The plot and subplots support the character development of family and friends. The dialog is easy and West Texan through and through. The narrative weaves a fast paced story of magical proportions that seem bigger than Texas itself, but reflect the truth of the times.
Hang on to the running board for wild ride!