Maslin Watch: Nobody Else Could Miss Her
Not Half As Much As Me

The history of Texas would seem to be a natural subject for the popular historian H. W. Brands. For one thing, Mr. Brands, biographer of Theodore Roosevelt and Benjamin Franklin, is a professor at Texas A&M University.

Yes, Lord knows, forget that he's displayed interest in a range of subjects not involving Texas (including a Gold Rush history Janet cites in the following graf). He lives in Texas, he should write about Texas. That's what they tell you in writing school, after all, to write what you know.

But a funny thing happens on the way to the Alamo. This material proves to be far knottier and more diffuse than Mr. Brands's earlier subject matter.

Funny how the history of a state that used to be its own country would be "far knottier and more diffuse" than the life of a single person. Who would've thunk? Still, due props given for the reasonably clever lead-in...

The book and the state are described by the same adjective string: "big, sprawling, heterogeneous and in some places quite dry." From there, Maslin mostly goes on to recap many of the book's highlights, with quotes, of course, though they don't seem quite as excessive here as they do in other reviews. She does briefly raise critical issues; "the author is so conversant with the intricacies of his subject that he assumes a degree of familiarity in the reader," and there aren't enough pictures. (The paucity of maps is, in all fairness, probably quite frustrating. I know it drives me nuts to not have maps to get perspective while reading these sorts of things.) She later suggests:

The nature of battle in Texas, Mr. Brands argues, can be seen as a template for subsequent demonstrations of the American spirit. His book describes the contentiousness, independence and sense of entitlement that eventually turned Texas, however briefly, into a free and self-contained nation.

But is his argument effective? Does Texas really have a feisty individualism that mirrors the American spirit? On that point, having used up her column inches on tales of Jim Bowies' slave smuggling and Sam Houston's appetite for liquor, Janet remains mute.

In addition to unanswered critical questions, another drawback of trying to cram a lot of data points into a tight column space is the potential for ambiguity, as when she refers to Texas as "the site of a failed uprising that would have turned it into the Republic of Fredonia." Now, for many readers, the first reaction will probably be to think she's making a Marx Brothers reference, leading to headscratching over what the Republic of Texas has in common with Duck Soup. Turns out that a fellow named Hayden Edwards really did declare Fredonian independence in 1826, ten years before Texas broke away from Mexico for good. An interesting bit of history, which perhaps deserves more than the fleeting (and distorting) reference it gets here; kinda makes me curious to see how Brands treats the incident himself.