Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen [1] – McMurtry, Larry

Description

ISBN: 0684854961 Title: Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen Author: McMurtry, Larry Binding: Hardcover Publisher: Simon and Schuster, New York Publication Date: 1999 Edition: First Edition Book Condition: NF- D-j Condition: VG+ Comments: Light wear to d-j. Two smudges on one page. Synopsis: In a lucid, brilliant work of nonfiction, Larry McMurtry has written a family portrait that also serves as a larger portrait of Texas itself, as it was and as it has become. Using an essay by the German literary critic Walter Benjamin that he first read in Archer City's Dairy Queen, McMurtry examines the small town way of life that big oil and big ranching have nearly destroyed. He praises the virtues of everything from a lime Dr. Pepper to the lost art of oral storytelling, and describes the brutal effect of the sheer vastness and emptiness of the Texas landscape on Texans, the decline of the cowboy, and the reality and the myth of the frontier.​ McMurtry writes frankly and with deep feeling about his own experiences as a writer, a parent, and a heart patient, and he deftly lays bare the raw material that helped shape his life's work: the creation of a vast, ambitious, fictional panorama of Texas in the past and the present. Throughout, McMurtry leaves his readers with constant reminders of his all-encompassing, boundless love of literature and books.