The Kings of Big Spring: God, Oil, and One Family's Search for the American Dream
(OverDrive MP3 Audiobook, OverDrive Listen)
This program is read by the author
"Think of it as a Texas version of Hillbilly Elegy." — Bryan Burrough, New York Times bestselling author of The Big Reach and Barbarians at the Gate
A brilliant audiobook saga of family, fortune, faith in Texas, where blood is bond and oil is king...
In 1892, Bryan Mealer's great-grandfather leaves the Georgia mountains and heads west into Texas, looking for wealth and adventure in the raw and open country. But his luck soon runs out. Beset by drought, the family loses their farm just as the dead pastures around them give way to one of the biggest oil booms in American history.
They eventually settle in the small town of Big Spring, where fast fortunes are being made from its own reserves of oil. For the next two generations, the Mealers live on the margins of poverty, laboring in the cotton fields and on the drilling rigs that sprout along the flatland, weathering dust and wind, booms and busts, and tragedies that scatter them like tumbleweed. After embracing Pentecostalism during the Great Depression, they rely heavily on their faith to steel them against hardship and despair. But for young Bobby Mealer, the author's father, religion is only an agent for rebellion.
In the winter of 1981, when the author is seven years old, Bobby receives a call from an old friend with a simple question, "How'd you like to be a millionaire?"
Twenty-six, and with a wife and three kids, Bobby had left his hometown to seek a life removed from the blowing dust and oil fields, and to find spiritual peace. But now Big Spring's streets are flooded again with roughnecks, money, and sin. Boom chasers pour in from the busted factory towns in the north. Drilling rigs rise like timber along the pastures, and poor men become millionaires overnight.
Grady Cunningham, Bobby's friend, is one of the newly-minted kings of Big Spring. Loud and flamboyant, with a penchant for floor-length fur coats, Grady pulls Bobby and his young wife into his glamorous orbit. While drilling wells for Grady's oil company, they fly around on private jets and embrace the honky-tonk high life of Texas oilmen. But beneath the Rolexes and Rolls Royce cars is a reality as dark as the crude itself. As Bobby soon discovers, his return to Big Spring is a backslider's journey into a spiritual wilderness, and one that could cost him his life.
A masterwork of memoir and narrative history, The Kings of Big Spring is an indelible portrait of fortune and ruin as big as Texas itself. In telling the story of four generations of his family, Bryan Mealer also tells the story of how America came to be.
More praise for The Kings of Big Spring:
"With a Texas accent and a soft-spoken tone, Mealer recounts scenes of drinking and drugs, divorce, and tragedy...Mealer gives listeners a very personal history lesson, showing how changing times and economic cycles affect both a town and a family." — AudioFile Magazine
"Mr. Mealer, who covered war in the Congo for the Associated Press and Harper's magazine, has impressive reporter's chops as well as a native West Texan's gift for storytelling. The combination produces the best kind of twofer: an engaging history of the oil patch wrapped in an intimate portrait of his own family." — Wall Street Journal
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Bryan Mealer. (2018). The Kings of Big Spring: God, Oil, and One Family's Search for the American Dream. Unabridged Macmillan Audio.
Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)Bryan Mealer. 2018. The Kings of Big Spring: God, Oil, and One Family's Search for the American Dream. Macmillan Audio.
Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)Bryan Mealer, The Kings of Big Spring: God, Oil, and One Family's Search for the American Dream. Macmillan Audio, 2018.
MLA Citation (style guide)Bryan Mealer. The Kings of Big Spring: God, Oil, and One Family's Search for the American Dream. Unabridged Macmillan Audio, 2018.
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This program is read by the author
"Think of it as a Texas version of Hillbilly Elegy." — Bryan Burrough, New York Times bestselling author of The Big Reach and Barbarians at the Gate
A brilliant audiobook saga of family, fortune, faith in Texas, where blood is bond and oil is king...
In 1892, Bryan Mealer's great-grandfather leaves the Georgia mountains and heads west into Texas, looking for wealth and adventure in the raw and open country. But his luck soon runs out. Beset by drought, the family loses their farm just as the dead pastures around them give way to one of the biggest oil booms in American history.
They eventually settle in the small town of Big Spring, where fast fortunes are being made from its own reserves of oil. For the next two generations, the Mealers live on the margins of poverty, laboring in the cotton fields and on the drilling rigs that sprout along the flatland, weathering dust and wind, booms and busts, and tragedies that scatter them like tumbleweed. After embracing Pentecostalism during the Great Depression, they rely heavily on their faith to steel them against hardship and despair. But for young Bobby Mealer, the author's father, religion is only an agent for rebellion.
In the winter of 1981, when the author is seven years old, Bobby receives a call from an old friend with a simple question, "How'd you like to be a millionaire?"
Twenty-six, and with a wife and three kids, Bobby had left his hometown to seek a life removed from the blowing dust and oil fields, and to find spiritual peace. But now Big Spring's streets are flooded again with roughnecks, money, and sin. Boom chasers pour in from the busted factory towns in the north. Drilling rigs rise like timber along the pastures, and poor men become millionaires overnight.
Grady Cunningham, Bobby's friend, is one of the newly-minted kings of Big Spring. Loud and flamboyant, with a penchant for floor-length fur coats, Grady pulls Bobby and his young wife into his glamorous orbit. While drilling wells for Grady's oil company, they fly around on private jets and embrace the honky-tonk high life of Texas oilmen. But beneath the Rolexes and Rolls Royce cars is a reality as dark as the crude itself. As Bobby soon discovers, his return to Big Spring is a backslider's journey into a spiritual wilderness, and one that could cost him his life.
A masterwork of memoir and narrative history, The Kings of Big Spring is an indelible portrait of fortune and ruin as big as Texas itself. In telling the story of four generations of his family, Bryan Mealer also tells the story of how America came to be.
More praise for The Kings of Big Spring:
"With a Texas accent and a soft-spoken tone, Mealer recounts scenes of drinking and drugs, divorce, and tragedy...Mealer gives listeners a very personal history lesson, showing how changing times and economic cycles affect both a town and a family." — AudioFile Magazine
"Mr. Mealer, who covered war in the Congo for the Associated Press and Harper's magazine, has impressive reporter's chops as well as a native West Texan's gift for storytelling. The combination produces the best kind of twofer: an engaging history of the oil patch wrapped in an intimate portrait of his own family." — Wall Street Journal- reviews
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- content: Bryan Mealer's father was part of the Texas oil boom of the 1980s, feeling like a king in his longtime friends' company. Mealer tells his father's boom-and-bust story as part of a century-long saga of his family and town. With a Texas accent and a soft-spoken tone, Mealer recounts scenes of drinking and drugs, divorce, and tragedy. Listeners will sympathize with a daughter who raises her siblings in the void left by their mother's neglect and with men who rebuild their lives after financial setbacks. Mealer gives listeners a very personal history lesson, showing how changing times and economic cycles affect both a town and a family. J.A.S. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine
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Starred review from October 30, 2017
In this excellent family history, journalist Mealer (The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind) follows his Scotch-Irish forebears from the hills of northern Georgia to a distant frontier of rugged beauty, untapped resources, and devastating hardship. The saga plays out against the vast backdrop of West Texas from the 1890s through the author’s youth in the 1980s as one bonanza after another is erased by boll weevil, drought, addiction, or greed. Through all the dust storms and oil gushers, through bankruptcy and epidemics, generations of Mealers chase the American dream only to see it slip through their grasps, leaving them to find solace in Christian faith and one another. Mealer brings together his disparate materials with ease. The miniature cosmos of family life is counterpointed by profiles of national figures such as Bob Wills, the founder of Western Swing, and Raymond Tollett, a polymath ex–FBI agent who turned a bankrupt refinery into a regional powerhouse. Post-WWII prosperity made the hobo camps, child mortality, and crushing poverty of the dust bowl and Depression impossibly remote, yet Mealer’s narrative allows figures long frozen in black and white to walk again in living color.
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This program is read by the author
"Think of it as a Texas version of Hillbilly Elegy." — Bryan Burrough, New York Times bestselling author of The Big Reach and Barbarians at the Gate
A brilliant audiobook saga of family, fortune, faith in Texas, where blood is bond and oil is king...
In 1892, Bryan Mealer's great-grandfather leaves the Georgia mountains and heads west into Texas, looking for wealth and adventure in the raw and open country. But his luck soon runs out. Beset by drought, the family loses their farm just as the dead pastures around them give way to one of the biggest oil booms in American history.
They eventually settle in the small town of Big Spring, where fast fortunes are being made from its own reserves of oil. For the next two generations, the Mealers live on the margins of poverty, laboring in the cotton fields and on the drilling rigs that sprout along the flatland, weathering dust...- sortTitle
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