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Title details for As Texas Goes... by Gail Collins - Available

As Texas Goes...

How the Lone Star State Hijacked the American Agenda

by Gail Collins
Gail Collins
Audiobook
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1 of 1 copy available
In one of the most timely political books in years, Gail Collins declares that “what happens in Texas doesn’t stay in Texas anymore.”
 
Gail Collins’s fascination with Texas began rather abruptly in that distant spring of 2009 when she heard Governor Rick Perry—back to the wall, boots to the ground—address a Tea Party rally full of passionate Texans who seemed to be interested in seceding from the Union. “How long had this been going on?” she wondered, on behalf of the rest of the nation. “Was it something that we said?”
The more she looked at Texas, the more she realized it was at the heart of the American political story. The Tea Party had Texas roots, with its passion for states’ rights and sense of persecution by an overreaching Washington. But Texas also seemed to be running the federal government it despised. Through its vigorous support of banking deregulation, which began with the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s and ended calamitously with the Wall Street crash of 2008, Texas’s boot prints were deep. 
In education, Texas had managed both to be the model for the wildly influential No Child Left Behind law and to provide some of the loudest political voices calling for the law to be trashed. In energy, Texas was the heart of the drill-baby-drill movement and the war against the whole concept of global warming.
Collins brilliantly frames this national movement through the outsized behavior and inimitable swagger of some of Texas’s most colorful and influential political figures, from former House of Representatives Majority Leader Tom DeLay, who got into politics when the EPA banned his favorite fire ant repellent, to Perry himself, who when confronted with the fact that his state had the country’s third-highest teen pregnancy rate, defended its abstinence-only sex education policy by doggedly asserting, “I’m just going to tell you from my own personal life. Abstinence works.”
Digging beneath the veneer of cowboy hats, oil derricks, and Alamo cries, Collins has produced a profoundly original work demonstrating that much of what ails America was first birthed in Texas. 
Like it or not, as Texas goes, so goes the nation.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    June 5, 2012

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9780307969866
      • File size: 178596 KB
      • Duration: 06:12:04

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      The author traces the Lone Star state's history, from the genesis of its ardent states' rights positions to the issues that shape its influence on the country. Schools, sex education, global warming, and business development are all covered. Collins delivers her own work. Her narration works in that it has the exact amount of emotion--an often incredulous, at times snarky, tone--with no campy Texas twangs. The book's importance can be summed into one prediction: At some point in our lifetimes, 10 percent of the U.S. workforce will be Texans-- citizens who grew up with a politicized or clouded education. Collins lays out the facts--and verbally rolls her eyes in the narration. M.B. © AudioFile 2012, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      April 23, 2012
      The outsized influence of the union’s largest state is decried in this by turns amused and appalled study of Texas’s government and its discontents. New York Times columnist Collins (When Everything Changed) revels in the state’s 10-gallon self-regard, Alamo-inspired cult of suicidal last stands, and eccentric right-wing pols. But the upshot of all that, she argues, is a disastrous model of public policy that inspired the Republican Party’s national platform: a rickety economic boom based on insecure, poverty-level jobs and massive state incentives to corporations; financial deregulation that led to banking meltdowns; a raft of ill-advised education nostrums, from the prototype of the No Child Left Behind Act to abstinence-only sex-ed programs and textbook guidelines that frown on evolution; skimpy public services, high rates of poverty and inequality, and low rates of health coverage and graduation. Collins’s book is really an indictment of what she calls America’s “empty-places” creed—the rural conservative populism that favors small government, low taxes, and lax regulation—through a takedown of its colorful epicenter. Much like the late Texas dissident Molly Ivins, she slathers plenty of wry humor onto a critique that stings like a red-hot brand. Agent: Alice Martell.

    • Publisher's Weekly

      August 27, 2012
      Gail Collins explores the ways that Texas has influenced the direction of national politics, education policy, and the economy during the past 50 years. From failing schools and problematic sexual education curriculums to banking and housing scandals, she illustrates how the Lone Star State has led the United States astray. Collins's most compelling feat is capturing the mentality that seems to propel much of Texas (and to varying degrees, conservative) politics. As a narrator, Collins turns in a workmanlike performance, her tone shifting between the objective, judgmental, and critical. On the whole, she keeps the production engaging, but does falter in one major way: a certain degree of disdain and condemnation permeates her voice, particularly when she makes jokes or quotes officials. While this may not be as palpable in the print edition, her narration often feels snide and is thus potentially off-putting to listeners who might have been convinced by the evidence and not the attitude. A Liveright hardcover.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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