"They have a staying quality, these Hookses, that I can only describe as haunting. They have inhabited my imagination all my life, inexplicable ghosts, to be exorcised only by that bit of magic that created them in the first place, the turn of a phrase."
Thus Callie Coe Wilson introduces us to her family of inveterate tale tellers, the expansive and eccentric Hooks clan of Hardin County, Texas. Wilson and her cousin Ellen Walker Rienstra capture in this unusual family saga the essence of why families take such delight in the stories of their ancestors.
We see William "Pap" Hooks,...

How did a profligate who killed a deputy sheriff before reforming, a mining engineer who went AWOL from the Austrian navy, and three East Texas drillers join forces with other equally colorful characters to drill on Spindletop Hill? The answers are all here--the challenge and frustration of the search, the excitement of the discovery, the euphoric chaos of the boom, and the genesis of the giant companies.
In this scholarly work firmly rooted in the narrative tradition, and using material collected over decades, the authors bring to life the efforts of Pattillo Higgins, Anthony Lucas, Al...