Comments (0) Best Remembrance of Houston Past - 2010
The Big Rich by Bryan Burrough
Vanity Fair reporter and Barbarians at the Gate author and native Texan Bryan Burrough was raised on tales of the exploits of the great oil men, and The Big Rich is likely the only book you will ever need on their successes and excesses. While Dallas-Fort Worth barons like the wise Richardsons, the crackpot Hunts and the dissolute Murchisons do occupy a broad swath of the tome's pages, Houston is well represented, with a full accounting of the mighty Cullen family and a swift and punchy (literally) retelling of the rise and fall of pugnacious Glenn McCarthy and his Shamrock Hotel. For Burrough, the demise of the Shamrock was the end of an era that began with the gusher at Spindletop, and never has that age, with all its whiskey-soaked infidelities, rampant anticommunist paranoia, family feuds and sheer myth-creating grandiosity been better captured on the page. Read it and weep, if only because they don't craft icy stares (or philanthropic souls) like Roy Cullen's anymore, nor wildcatters like Glenn McCarthy, who could not only inspire James Dean's character in Giant but also probably drink Donald Draper under the table and steal his best girl to boot. (Not to mention kick his ass.) All that, and now forgotten, once ubiquitous local socialite Baron Ricky DiPortanova and his River Oaks swankienda soirees, too.
