Texas Blood: Seven Generations Among the Outlaws, Ranchers, Indians, Missionaries, Soldiers, and Smugglers of the Borderlands

by Roger D. Hodge Narrated by Roger Hodge

Overview

In the tradition of Ian Frazier's Great Plains, and as vivid as the work of Cormac McCarthy, an intoxicating, singularly illuminating history of the Texas borderlands from their settlement through seven generations of Roger D. Hodge's ranching family.

What brought the author's family to Texas? What is it about Texas that for centuries has exerted a powerful allure for adventurers and scoundrels, dreamers and desperate souls, outlaws and outliers? In search of answers, Hodge travels across his home state--which he loves and hates in shifting measure--tracing the wanderings of his ancestors into forgotten histories along vanished roads. Here is an unsentimental, keenly insightful attempt to grapple with all that makes Texas so magical, punishing, and polarizing. Here is a spellbindingly evocative portrait of the borderlands--with its brutal history of colonization, conquest, and genocide; where stories of death and drugs and desperation play out daily. And here is a contemplation of what it means that the ranching industry that has sustained families like Hodge's for almost two centuries is quickly fading away, taking with it a part of our larger, deep-rooted cultural inheritance. A wholly original fusion of memoir and history--as piercing as it is elegiac--Texas Blood is a triumph.

Editorial Reviews

The New York Times Book Review - Stephen Harrigan

…a fervent pastiche of memory and reportage and history…If Hodge is susceptible every now and then to the hypnotic Bible rhythms of [Cormac] McCarthy's language, for the most part he writes with an earnest, stripped-down clarity. He's smart, observant and skeptical. He has no interest in adding another volume to the library shelves of rousing Texas hoohah…Texas Blood is a rich journey. Whether he's writing about modern-day drug smuggling…or the itineraries of 16th-century Spanish entradas, Hodge is always deep in the buffalo grass. His reporting is vigorous. As a citizen historian, he has a reliable eye for important scholarship…Best of all, Hodge is haunted. He never gets mystical, but neither is he ever out of touch with the shimmering, mysterious history of the land he's writing about, or the unfathomable allure it had for ancient peoples and his own pioneer family.

Publishers Weekly

07/03/2017
Hodge (The Mendacity of Hope), national editor of the Intercept, embarks on a singular journey to rediscover his borderland-Texas roots, telling stories of his adventures as a youthful ranch hand and recollecting memories from his family’s land. While reminiscing, Hodge also retraces the path of his distant ancestors on their own treks through other parts of Texas, Oklahoma, and Arizona before settling in the arid Texas backcountry. Texas’s complicated, multicultural history becomes part of Hodge’s narrative; ancient pictographs, battles between Comanches and settlers, and the demoralizing effects of the drug war all feature in this heartbreaking and mesmerizing story. Hodge’s casual tone possesses an easy charm, with each anecdote sparking deeper dives into historical and cultural issues that reveal how Texas’s violent past continues to affect its present. Hodge routinely puts his life into the hands of others—though occasionally he comes across as patronizing toward people he encounters—including border agents and a spry, impish guide who aids Hodge in bearing witness to ceremonies at a religious shrine. Hodge combines a journalist’s eye with a native son’s love to give readers clear insight into southwestern Texas’s past, present, and future. Maps & photos. (Oct.)

From the Publisher

All [of Roger D. Hodge’s] effort has produced a book that will be beloved by Texans and fascinating to anyone else who wants to understand why the strange geographical category of ‘state’ still matters in our ostensibly globalized age. . . . How wonderful it would be to have not only a ‘Texas Blood’ but a ‘California Blood,’ then a ‘Pennsylvania Blood,’ then a ‘Puerto Rico Blood,’ slowly shading in the vast and mysterious American map.” —Craig Fehrman, San Francisco Chronicle

“[Roger D. Hodge is] smart, observant, and skeptical. . . . ‘Texas Blood’ is a rich journey.” —Stephen Harrigan, The New York Times Book Review

“This is part elegy, part picaresque, part memoir and part history, all bound together in prose that is by turns lyrical and slashing. . . . We're all just passing through this barbarous country. Splendid writers like Hodge, with a sharp sense of history and a loving but unsparing pen, help us understand what we're seeing as we go.” —Dallas News

“Heartbreaking and mesmerizing… Hodge combines a journalist’s eye with a native son’s love to give readers clear insight into southwestern Texas’s past, present, and future.” —Publishers Weekly

“Imagine finding out that the land where Cormac McCarthy set one of his most brutal novels was your family's ranch . . . I've read loads of books about Texas but rarely encountered one so deeply of it, so deep the story escapes and becomes a treatise on the twisted American past, and the force exerted by that on our complex present.” —John Jeremiah Sullivan, author of Pulphead

“A fusion of historical narrative, memoir, exposé, and lament, Texas Blood is a rigorously-researched, compassionate examination of one of our country’s most polarizing states. Hodge casts an unflinching eye on the violence of the borderlands, yet does so with the tender lyricism and spiritual acumen of the best Cormac McCarthy. He deftly traverses the panoply of his home state’s shifting histories and landscapes while never losing sight of the individual: a suppliant walking barefoot, a child’s forgotten grave, the murdered body of a family friend. Texas Blood is a timely, important work: in grappling with Texas, Roger Hodge is holding America’s own deeply-troubled feet to the fire.” —Jamie Quatro, author of I Want to Show You More

“Hypnotically written, deeply researched, profoundly elegiac—the adverbs pile up, and with good reason. Roger D. Hodge has written a wonderful book about our most vexed and peculiarly American state, with an eye for detail and anecdote that's as loving as it is merciless.” —Tom Bissell, author of Apostle

“A thoughtful portrait of a hard and beautiful place: part ethnography, part literary criticism, part family and regional history, always personal… Sincere, accurate, and open-minded, sometimes intimate, this book qualifies as a true primary source. After the present of Texas Blood has become past, Hodge’s observations and summations will still be well worth reading.” –William T. Vollmann, author of The Dying Grass

“Texas Blood blends the personal and the historical to create a vivid portrait of a place unable to transcend its violent past. Roger D. Hodge is a very gifted writer, and he tells his story with the energy of a perfectly paced novel.” —Ron Rash, author of Serena

“In Texas Blood, Roger Hodge takes the reader on journeys through intricate maps of the past and present, through politics and luck and greed and death, but always returning to the beautiful, unforgiving land of his heritage.” —Susan Straight, author of Highwire Moon

“Roger Hodge has crafted a masterful alloy of memoir and reportage, of social criticism and regional history. Texas Blood is an unforgettable foray into our most mysterious, violent, myth-soaked state, a portrait of enormous talent and skill that reveals precisely what America is.” —William Giraldi, author of Hold the Dark

Library Journal

09/01/2017
Seasoned journalist and author Hodge (The Mendacity of Hope) presents an extraordinary account of his Texan heritage by exploring his family's deep roots within the Lone Star state. Fully in touch with his romantic sensibilities, Hodge traverses the length and breadth of Texas's cultural history to discover its intertwining past and present. With confidence and verve, he touches on myriad topics of interest, such as how practical ranchers differ from idealist environmentalists, how early Ute and Comanche successes in the Southwest led to later Texan triumphs in contesting Mexico, and how high-technology satellite and drone surveillance systems are not a panacea for modern border patrol efforts. VERDICT A fascinating and enthralling view of the vibrant origins and ongoing cultural development of the author's home state. Highly recommended as a tour de force examination of an often cantankerous, perplexingly humorous American history and lifeways.—Nathan Bender, Albany Cty. P.L., Laramie, WY

Kirkus Reviews

2017-08-07
A native son takes a loping tour of the Lone Star State and the paths to, through, and from it.Intercept national editor Hodge (The Mendacity of Hope: Barack Obama and the Betrayal of American Liberalism, 2010), a former editor of the Oxford American and Harper's, grew up down on the Rio Grande and learned how to handle a rope and a six-shooter, the whole package. He got out at 18, and, he writes, "I'm still gone." That kind of talk can get a person branded as a carpetbagger, but the author has long lines of history and blood tying him to the state over a couple of centuries, exploring which is the point of this somewhat shapeless but always interesting ramble across the state and points beyond, from the pioneer trails of Missouri to the gone-west paths across New Mexico and Arizona to California. Some of Hodge's explorations are bookish: he's a huge fan of Cormac McCarthy, wandering around the vicinity of Del Rio contemplating No Country for Old Men and other "messages from lost worlds, artifacts of vanished histories." Elsewhere, Hodge calls on the Border Patrol, ponders the lost ways of the Comanche Trail and the ever speculative argonauts, and visits the grave of Sam Houston's Cherokee wife and a much-contested shrine constantly beset by what one defender calls "the Satanics from Juárez." Hodge's suggestion that the "official" history of Texas, whatever that might be, excludes many of its players, from Native Americans to French buccaneers and German freethinkers, isn't quite accurate; no modern writer on Texas dares overlook them, and even the old-timers along the lines of J. Frank Dobie and John Graves recognized how diverse Texas was and is. Still, Hodge does a nice job of relating some of those lesser-known stories. Of a piece with revisionist Westerns à la Larry McMurtry and Richard White and of much interest to readers along the border.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169151848
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	10/10/2017
Edition description:	Unabridged

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