Publishers Weekly
08/19/2019
Harrigan (The Gates of the Alamo) describes post-Columbian Texas in novelistic style in this eloquent homage to the Lone Star state. He follows many figures—among them the 19th-century Mexican general and politician Antonio López de Santa Anna, Comanche chief Quanah Parker, and “Mother of Texas” Jane Herbert Wilkinson Long—and makes smooth transitions between landmark events, such as the 16th-century Spanish expeditions and the Alamo. Lesser-known but powerful stories, including that of the devastating 1963 natural gas explosion at a New London school, pepper the colorful narrative. Despite the author’s love of Texas, he’s also frank about the horrific violence that figures throughout its history, including the experiences of Native Americans and enslaved people. Harrigan jauntily describes unexpected connections: he recounts learning later that his seemingly average childhood neighbors included WWII hero Joe Dawson and civil rights champion Dr. Hector Garcia. Texan politicians such as H. Ross Perot, Barbara Jordan, Ann Richards, and the Bush presidents receive attention without political analysis; Harrigan recalls getting to know George and Laura Bush as fellow parents of young daughters. Scenes of dusty West Texas and the pine-laden eastern forests add a travelogue touch. History lovers will enjoy this packed, fascinating account of a singular state. Agent: Esther Newberg, ICM Partners. (Oct.)
San Antonio Express-News
"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 Report
"[Big Wonderful Thing] reads like a novel about our great state’s history with all the beauty, suspense, kindness, strength, tragedy, loss, and even horror you’d never expect from a history book."
Houston Chronicle
"[An] epic new history of Texas…The book is nosed out in sheer heft only by Texas itself, it seems. But it doesn't read that way. Harrigan…outlines Texas' particulars from prehistory to just after 9/11 in granular detail, with an intimate, conversational style."
Abilene Reporter-News
"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."
The American Conservative
"The sheer number of individual Texans, here, is as incredible as the Texas landscape...Along with the usual suspects of Texas lore, Big Wonderful Thing throws light on many overlooked figures...Harrigan serves as a masterful guide on this journey, navigating Big Wonderful Thing safely between the abyss of historical revisionism and the fairyland of hagiography. Harrigan's Texas is mythically large and as majestically unusual as the longhorn that Texans love so much, but Big Wonderful Thing keeps its feet firmly planted on the ground."
The Literary South
"Harrigan’s gift for storytelling makes this monumental work a pleasure to read. Throughout this extremely well-researched and fascinating book, Harrigan strives to dispel the myths of Texas history and remain true to its reality, creating a real page-turner for aficionados of Texas history and novices alike."
"19 Moments That Shaped Texas in 2019" Texas Monthly
"What really sets Big Wonderful Thing apart is that it reads more like Lonesome Dove than it does something you might have been assigned in your seventh grade Texas history class. Harrigan is a master of identifying anecdotes that have been tucked away in forgotten corners, dusting them off, and spinning them into great yarns...Though the book leads the reader on a singular, epic trip through the state’s past, each chapter also manages to feel self-contained, like a magazine feature."
NPR
"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."
El Paso Inc
[Harrigan] provides a comprehensive history lesson by telling a story of interwoven people, places, and events in such a way that you forget how much you are learning.
"Southwest Books of the Year" Pima County Public Library
"At once objective and intensely personal, this expansive history exposes the reality beneath the myth of Texas exceptionalism and, in the process, gives overdue credit to people who fought in the shadows to forge a multi-cultural society where, today, Vietnamese refugees stand arm in arm with Alamo descendants. Harrigan has done a remarkable thing: in 900-plus pages, he vividly reimagines the endlessly fascinating saga of a state and its citizens."
New York Review of Books
"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."
D Magazine
[Harrigan's] story of Texas succeeds because of its diversity and his embrace of the success and failures of the multifaceted peoples who have fought over what Texas means for centuries. His keen sense for the kind of interesting personalities to tell this story finds a fertile home in Dallas.
Texas Highways
"[Big Wonderful Thing] provides an excellent perspective on [Texas's] rich history with a wider, more diverse lens…Harrigan brings his exceptional talents for storytelling and reporting to this volume that promises to educate—and entertain—many about the complexitites of this rich and storied state."
Texas Observer
"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."
austin360
"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."
Austin Chronicle
"Throughout Big Wonderful Thing, Harrigan's sense of wonder is infectious, leading the reader to see the state with fresh eyes, to see its landscape and the people on it as deserving of their reputation as outsized in every respect, larger than life."
Wall Street Journal
"[Harrigan] has now given us a—no other word for it—Texas-sized book about the place he’s called home for decades. Lavishly illustrated, fully annotated, brimming with sass, intelligence, trenchant analysis, literary acumen and juicy details, it is a page-turner that can be read straight through or at random. It is big. It is popular history at its best."
Southwestern Historical Quarterly
"Big Wonderful Thing is a popular history of Texas that does exactly what the author intended: provide highly readable and entertaining coverage of the sweep of Texas history."
HistoryNet
"Harrigan has crafted a volume of almost 900 pages that reads like a series of presentations by master storytellers. He connects the prominent dots of much-discussed figures and events with threads about everyday Texans whose stories, many told here for the first time, illustrate important parts of the state's history. Even when Harrigan is trading in the familiar, he marshals fresh detail about women, enslaved Africans, Native Americans, poor whites, and other stripes of Texan often overlooked in accounts of the state's formation...The title, from a statement by the artist Georgia O'Keefe, perfectly suits this well-researched and highly readable book."
Starred Review Foreword Reviews
"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."
Kerrville Daily Times
"A comprehensive look at the history of our state...Harrigan doesn't burnish the heights or ignore the depths of Texas history; his book reflects both the bright and the dark, like a piece of photographic film, recording light and shadow as it makes an image."
Literary Hub Geoff Dyer
"Before embarking on Stephen Harrigan's Big Wonderful Thing I kept asking myself, do I really need to read a 900-page history of Texas? Well, I suppose I didn't need to but within 20 pages I wanted to, every spare moment I got."
"Our 15 Favorite Books of 2019" Houston Chronicle
"The long-awaited history of Texas by a master storyteller is here. We haven’t had such a definitive history in years. For all readers, what Harrigan does so well is bring these stories to life — no dry tome here."
Rivard Report
"Harrigan takes the yellowed vanish off in his magnificent new history of Texas…[Big Wonderful Thing is] a great corrective for those of us who grew up hearing mostly about the evils of carpet baggers and scalawags."
Alcalde
"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."
Wall Street Journal
"[Harrigan] has now given us a—no other word for it—Texas-sized book about the place he's called home for decades. Lavishly illustrated, fully annotated, brimming with sass, intelligence, trenchant analysis, literary acumen and juicy details, it is a page-turner that can be read straight through or at random. It is big. It is popular history at its best."
Foreword Reviews
"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."
Library Journal
★ 10/01/2019
Best-selling novelist Harrigan (Gates of the Alamo) is well positioned to provide a new take on Texas history, presenting a narrative that not only covers the legends of popular lore, such as Davy Crockett and the siege of the Alamo, but also presents a more nuanced view of the traditional mythologies through the perspectives of people who have often been marginalized. Essentially, this is Texas history as seen and discovered by Harrigan through his experiences as a child and a scholar of the state, providing "behind the curtain" glimpses of his process of crafting the work. VERDICT Harrigan is a master storyteller and weaves a highly enjoyable tale of Texas that is sometimes tall but always big. A must-read for all Texans and those who are curious about more than the legend of the state.—Michael C. Miller, Austin P.L. & Austin History Ctr., TX
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2019-06-17
Austin-based novelist Harrigan (A Friend of Mr. Lincoln, 2016, etc.) serves up a lively history of the nation-sized Lone Star State.
The title comes from the painter Georgia O'Keeffe, who marveled at Texas but wound up making her fortune in next-door New Mexico. Of course, Texas has many next-door neighbors, each influencing it and being influenced by it: the plains of Oklahoma, the bayous and deep forests of Louisiana, the Gulf of Mexico, Mexico itself, all where South and West and Midwest meet. Telling its story is a daunting task: If the project of the gigantic centennial Big Tex statue with which Harrigan opens his story was to "Texanize Texans," it was one in which women, ethnic minorities, the poor, and many other sorts of people were forgotten in the face of stalwarts like Sam Houston, Judge Roy Bean, and Davy Crockett. Not here. The standbys figure, but in interesting lights: Houston was famous and even infamous in his day, but his successor, Mirabeau Lamar, mostly known only for the Austin avenue named for him, was just as much a man of parts, "a poet and classical scholar with a bucolic vision of the empire that his administration aimed to wrest from the hands of its enemies." Harrigan's story of the Alamo is also nuanced: It is not true that there were no survivors, but the fact that the survivors were slaves has rendered them invisible—as is the fact that many Mexican officers who served under Santa Anna pleaded with him to show mercy to the rest. The Alamo has given a Texas flair to all sorts of things, including a recent golf tournament, highlighting Texans' tendency toward "a blend of valor and swagger." Just so, 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.
As good a state history as has ever been written and a must-read for Texas aficionados.
