Gail Collins explores the ways that Texas has influenced the direction of national politics, education policy, and the economy during the past 50 years. From failing schools and problematic sexual education curriculums to banking and housing scandals, she illustrates how the Lone Star State has led the United States astray. Collins's most compelling feat is capturing the mentality that seems to propel much of Texas (and to varying degrees, conservative) politics. As a narrator, Collins turns in a workmanlike performance, her tone shifting between the objective, judgmental, and critical. On the whole, she keeps the production engaging, but does falter in one major way: a certain degree of disdain and condemnation permeates her voice, particularly when she makes jokes or quotes officials. While this may not be as palpable in the print edition, her narration often feels snide and is thus potentially off-putting to listeners who might have been convinced by the evidence and not the attitude. A Liveright hardcover. (June)
As Texas Goes...: How the Lone Star State Hijacked the American Agenda
Narrated by Gail Collins
Gail CollinsUnabridged — 6 hours, 13 minutes
As Texas Goes...: How the Lone Star State Hijacked the American Agenda
Narrated by Gail Collins
Gail CollinsUnabridged — 6 hours, 13 minutes
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Overview
*
Gail Collins's fascination with Texas began rather abruptly in that distant spring of 2009 when she heard Governor Rick Perry-back to the wall, boots to the ground-address a Tea Party rally full of passionate Texans who seemed to be interested in seceding from the Union. “How long had this been going on?” she wondered, on behalf of the rest of the nation. “Was it something that we said?”
The more she looked at Texas, the more she realized it was at the heart of the American political story. The Tea Party had Texas roots, with its passion for states' rights and sense of persecution by an overreaching Washington. But Texas also seemed to be running the federal government it despised. Through its vigorous support of banking deregulation, which began with the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s and ended calamitously with the Wall Street crash of 2008, Texas's boot prints were deep.*
In education, Texas had managed both to be the model for the wildly influential No Child Left Behind law and to provide some of the loudest political voices calling for the law to be trashed. In energy, Texas was the heart of the drill-baby-drill movement and the war against the whole concept of global warming.
Collins brilliantly frames this national movement through the outsized behavior and inimitable swagger of some of Texas's most colorful and influential political figures, from former House of Representatives Majority Leader Tom DeLay, who got into politics when the EPA banned his favorite fire ant repellent, to Perry himself, who when confronted with the fact that his state had the country's third-highest teen pregnancy rate, defended its abstinence-only sex education policy by doggedly asserting, “I'm just going to tell you from my own personal life. Abstinence works.”
Digging beneath the veneer of cowboy hats, oil derricks, and Alamo cries, Collins has produced a profoundly original work demonstrating that much of what ails America was first birthed in Texas.*
Like it or not, as Texas goes, so goes the nation.
Editorial Reviews
The outsized influence of the union’s largest state is decried in this by turns amused and appalled study of Texas’s government and its discontents. New York Times columnist Collins (When Everything Changed) revels in the state’s 10-gallon self-regard, Alamo-inspired cult of suicidal last stands, and eccentric right-wing pols. But the upshot of all that, she argues, is a disastrous model of public policy that inspired the Republican Party’s national platform: a rickety economic boom based on insecure, poverty-level jobs and massive state incentives to corporations; financial deregulation that led to banking meltdowns; a raft of ill-advised education nostrums, from the prototype of the No Child Left Behind Act to abstinence-only sex-ed programs and textbook guidelines that frown on evolution; skimpy public services, high rates of poverty and inequality, and low rates of health coverage and graduation. Collins’s book is really an indictment of what she calls America’s “empty-places” creed—the rural conservative populism that favors small government, low taxes, and lax regulation—through a takedown of its colorful epicenter. Much like the late Texas dissident Molly Ivins, she slathers plenty of wry humor onto a critique that stings like a red-hot brand. Agent: Alice Martell. (June)
"Gail Collins is the funniest serious political commentator in America. Reading As Texas Goes… is pure pleasure from page one."
"There's no funnier writer about politics than Gail Collins, and in Texas, she's found the perfect canvas. The state's record at producing some of the nuttiest characters ever to enter American public life is matched only by its recent prowess in infecting the other 49 states with those politicians' most crackpot policy ideas. Collins serves up hilarity and horror in equal measure and leaves you rooting for Rick Perry to make good on his threat to lead Texas out of the Union."
"The reader who senses a touch of sarcasm would not be wrong…[Collins] has a good eye for absurd details."
"Collins lays out a convincing case that many of the nation’s more misguided—sometimes outright wacky—policies originated in Texas, ranging from public education to environmental regulation to teaching kids about sex… Worth a read."
"There is no one like Gail Collins: uproarious fun on every page, but with a serious point. In this wonderful book she devastates Texas for its hypocrisy, its ignorance, its worship of wealth. But you cannot keep laughing as she shows how the Texan mind works a baleful influence on the rest of the country."
"With wit and humor, Collins focuses on major Texas figures, from Davy Crockett to Rick Perry, to offer a portrait of an outsize state anxious to take on the task of setting the rest of the country straight and of the broader implications that has for the rest of the country."
"New York Times columnist Gail Collins makes a compelling case in As Texas Goes… that much of what ails the nation began down in the Lone Star State."
"[Collins] set off on a whirlwind tour to discover the Lone Star State and its transcendent meaning, deploying a breezy, wisecracking polemical style familiar to fans (including me) of her twice-weekly column in The Times."
Gail Collins is the funniest serious political commentator in America. Reading As Texas Goes . . . is pure pleasure from page one.”—Rachel Maddow
“There’s no funnier writer about politics than Gail Collins, and in Texas she’s found the perfect canvas. The state’s record at producing some of the nuttiest characters ever to enter American public life is matched only by its recent prowess in infecting the other forty-nine states with those politicians’ most crackpot policy ideas. Collins serves up hilarity and horror in equal measure and leaves you rooting for Rick Perry to make good on his threat to lead Texas out of the Union.”—Frank Rich
“Here is the WPA guide to the follies of our time. Gail Collins walks us through a vast and formerly prosperous land that has lost itself in delusions of its own magnificence; that has set itself ablaze with a crusade against learning; that has grown dizzy with free-market fantasies that no amount of real-world failure seems able to correct. Yes, Texas is a hell of a place to be a corporation, but for humans it’s a different story.” —Thomas Frank, author of What’s the Matter with Kansas?
“There is no one like Gail Collins: uproarious fun on every page, but with a serious point. In this wonderful book she devastates Texas for its hypocrisy, its ignorance, its worship of wealth. But you cannot keep laughing as she shows how the Texan mind works a baleful influence on the rest of the country.”—Anthony Lewis
So you think the nation's political divide is between the coasts and the heartland? The Christian Far Right and the rest of us? The one percent and the 99 percent? Nope. Collins (columnist, New York Times; When Everything Changed) takes us to the source: Texas. With her characteristic wry amusement, Collins observes a state where politicians hew to an "ideology of empty places," even as 80 percent of the country lives in/near its major cities. As Collins puts it, Texas says, "You leave me alone and I'll leave you alone." Trouble is, she goes on to note, Texas is not actually leaving us alone. From financial deregulation to strong-arming national textbook publishers to follow Texas mores on sex education, guns, and God, to the swagger of Texan U.S. presidents who have dragged more than Texas into war, to meager insurance coverage of its people, and massive job numbers at or below the minimum wage, to pro-oil and antiglobal warming initiatives, Texas has preached states' rights, while its national players, from Tom Delay to Phil Gramm, George W. Bush, and Rick Perry, promote their agendas nationally. Collins maps the invasion of Texas credos into our lives and into the U.S. financial, medical, educational, political, military, and legal infrastructure. The prognosis for Texas's future influence is less clear; the state will be majority Latino soon. Will that bring change? VERDICT A fascinating book, written with great wit and a power to disturb. Essential reading before November. [See Prepub Alert, 12/5/11.]—Margaret Heilbrun, Library Journal
The author traces the Lone Star state’s history, from the genesis of its ardent states’ rights positions to the issues that shape its influence on the country. Schools, sex education, global warming, and business development are all covered. Collins delivers her own work. Her narration works in that it has the exact amount of emotion—an often incredulous, at times snarky, tone—with no campy Texas twangs. The book’s importance can be summed into one prediction: At some point in our lifetimes, 10 percent of the U.S. workforce will be Texans-- citizens who grew up with a politicized or clouded education. Collins lays out the facts—and verbally rolls her eyes in the narration. M.B. © AudioFile 2012, Portland, Maine
New York Times political columnist Collins (When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present, 2009, etc.) zeroes in on what makes Texas so important and why the rest of the country needs to know and care about what's happening there. Texans, writes the author, think they live in a wide-open empty space where carrying a concealed weapon is acceptable because people have to take care of themselves, and the government has no business telling them what to do. In her inimitable style, the unabashed liberal examines the shenanigans of Texans from four angles: first, a hilarious look at some of Texas' past heroes and present politicos and at how the empty-space ethos has shaped the state's policies; second, a close-up examination of several areas wheres she says the state has gone wildly, sadly wrong (its deregulation of financial markets, attempts at reforming schools and funding, or defunding, education, and major missteps on sex education, energy, the environment, pollution and global climate change); third, a scathing report on the two-tiered, low-tax, low-service economy of the state; and finally, Collins' take on where Texas, soon to be a Hispanic-majority state, is heading. The author loads her report with funny but dismaying anecdotes and dozens of revealing interviews. She does not neglect the hard facts. An appendix includes "Texas on the Brink," a report compiled by the Legislative Study Group of the Texas House of Representatives. It gives an especially grim picture of the failings of our second-largest state. Among the states, it is first in executions and in the amount of carbon dioxide emissions but 45th in SAT scores and 49th in the percentage of low-income people covered by Medicaid. In Collins' view, the rest of us feel the influence of Texas in our lives every day, and "if Texas goes south, it's taking us along." A timely portrait of Texas delivered with Collins' unique brand of insightful humor.
Product Details
| BN ID: | 2940169176902 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Penguin Random House |
| Publication date: | 06/05/2012 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
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