The Texas Legacy Project: Stories of Courage and Conservation (review)

Quick, well-defined excerpts of oral histories make this an eminently readable book. The editors provide plenty of comments, a brief summary about each narrator, maps, spreadsheets, and all the tools you need for an overview of their topic. A spreadsheet detailing the history of conservation in Texas is particularly informative, but the interviews speak for themselves. The excerpts presented here are brief and illustrative. In a few paragraphs, the authors paint a clear, understandable picture of each narrator's role in the conservation history of Texas. Pictures of each speaker and sometimes a picture of some aspect of their topic help inform that illustration. In some cases, a series of stills capture hand gestures and animated speakers beautifully.

If you are a Texas resident, you will recognize many of the names, and you will certainly recognize the topics and causes. The excerpts bring the passion and dedication of each conservationist quickly to the fore. Their enthusiasm and commitment is so clearly portrayed that it is hard to resist grabbing a shovel or binoculars or a keyboard and pitching right in. Narrators from all walks of life, all with a Texas twang you can almost hear, tell how they fell into, were pushed into, and sometimes even tried to hide their fascination with nature and the environment. In each case that devotion and fascination led them to the "environmental movement," a conservation mentality. But these people are not preaching. They are talking to you from their hearts about their love for their environment and their profound commitment to preserving it. It is worth noting, though, that one narrator is a Baptist preacher and part of his struggle is bringing his fellow congregants to that conservation mentality.

I was particularly struck with the way the choice of words evoked that Texas twang. No words are misspelled or accents exaggerated. Simply through the turn of a phrase and picturesque speech, such as Jim Hightower's "'Status quo' is Latin for 'the mess we're in'" (36), the editors capture the character of Texas speech and convey it to the reader. Many of the comments, even with the Texas twang, perhaps especially because of that inferred twang, are pithy and thought provoking, capturing the spirit and challenge of conservation in Texas in just a sentence or two: ". . . bringing land into the public inventory was extremely difficult. First, every time you spend a dollar to buy a piece of land, that's a dollar that you can't spend on something else" (Interview with Andy Sansom, 55).

Another reviewer commented that the "title of this book may be drier than the west Texas desert, but the contents are juicier than a rib eye (substitute grapefruit, if you're a vegetarian)" (review by "mollycoxe" at http://www.amazon.com/gp/cdp/member-reviews/A33FHKRRAD0FPH/ref=cm_cr_dp_auth_rev?ie=UTF8&sort_by=MostRecentReview). The title is dry, and I postponed reading overly long; the title made the book seem to weigh thirty pounds. The interviews are wonderful, though—full of life and joy and humor. Each quick excerpt is engaging and readable. So many of the names are familiar, and it is great to find out why the names are familiar. I have heard that there are more books written, bought, and sold about Texas than any other state. Just a quick perusal of this book will show you why. Texans uniformly think Texas is special. It might be hard for the untrained eye to see that beauty looking at Houston gridlock, or the west Texas desert, but these interviews impart what it is we residents see behind the high rises, in the Chihuahuan desert, and in Cadillac Ranch country up near Amarillo—those of us who understand that a trip to Galveston could be called a "vacation." The speakers are protecting their "home country," the land they grew up on in many cases, the land of their ancestors, or land that...