Price: $31.50
(as of Oct 21,2019 00:54:00 UTC – Details)
“Harrigan, surveying thousands of years of history that lead to the banh mi restaurants of Houston and the juke joints of Austin, remembering the forgotten as well as the famous, delivers an exhilarating blend of the base and the ignoble, a very human story indeed. [Big Wonderful Thing is] as good a state history as has ever been written and a must-read for Texas aficionados.” (Kirkus, Starred Review)
“Harrigan, essentially, is to Texas literature what Willie Nelson is to Texas music…Texas is an incredibly fascinating state—and Harrigan, who recognizes that the state’s diversity is what makes it great, truly does it justice. Endlessly readable and written with great care, Big Wonderful Thing is just that.” (NPR 2019-09-30)
“The great strength of Harrigan’s work is that he tells the stories of all the types of people who have lived in Texas, from its earliest days into modern times, with a sense that all of their lives mattered in fashioning the state’s identity.” (New York Review of Books 2019-10-03)
“Harrigan uses his stupendous storytelling skills to great effect [in Big Wonderful Thing]. He covers the state’s major historical events from inventive angles, introduces newly discovered archaeological and archival research, and excels at puffing up many of Texas’s larger-than-life personalities.” (Foreword Reviews, Starred Review)
“Harrigan describes post-Columbian Texas in novelistic style in this eloquent homage to the Lone Star state…History lovers will enjoy this packed, fascinating account of a singular state.” (Publishers Weekly 2019-08-07)
“The shelf that holds your Texana—T.R. Fehrenbach’s ‘Lone Star,’ James Michener’s fictionalized ‘Texas’—may need to be reinforced. Harrigan…has a contender to sit beside those worthy tomes…Harrigan’s Lone Star tales are embodied by people great and unknown, many of whom would not have registered in what he calls the ‘revised standard version of Texas history.'” (San Antonio Express-News 2019-09-05)
“Because it is so well told and because it embraces so much of the state’s charms and contradictions, Big Wonderful Thing is likely to define popular Texas history for the general reader for at least a generation to come.” (austin360 2019-09-27)
“Harrigan is at his best when he concentrates on the state’s abundance of big personalities, offering up a gallery of Texas scoundrels, psychopaths, and incompetents…[Harrigan] brings an appealing humility to the impossible task of cramming a raucous, vicious, glorious state into one big, wonderful book.” (Texas Observer 2019-09-30)
“A big wonderful book…[Big Wonderful Thing] is fun to read. Harrigan knows how to tell a story that keeps the reader looking forward to the next one.” (Abilene Reporter-News 2019-09-26)
“Big Wonderful Thing…takes readers around the vast landscape [of Texas] to see everything from the first native tribes and colonists to artists and politicians. Harrigan’s book connects the people and places who’ve made Texas what it was and is.” (Alcalde 2019-10-01)
