As Texas Goes...: How the Lone Star State Hijacked the American Agenda

by Gail Collins

Overview

“Gail Collins is the funniest serious political commentator in America. Reading As Texas Goes… is pure pleasure from page one.” —Rachel Maddow

A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year (Nonfiction)

As Texas Goes . . . provides a trenchant yet often hilarious look into American politics and the disproportional influence of Texas, which has become the model for not just the Tea Party but also the Republican Party. Now with an expanded introduction and a new concluding chapter that will assess the influence of the Texas way of thinking on the 2012 election, Collins shows how the presidential race devolved into a clash between the so-called “empty places” and the crowded places that became a central theme in her book. The expanded edition will also feature more examples of the Texas style, such as Governor Rick Perry’s nearsighted refusal to accept federal Medicaid funding as well as the proposed ban on teaching “critical thinking” in the classroom. As Texas Goes . . . will prove to be even more relevant to American politics by the dawn of a new political era in January 2013.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780871404756
Publisher:	Liveright Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	03/04/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Gail Collins, the best-selling author of When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present, is a national columnist for the New York Times. She lives in New York City.

What People are Saying About This

Dan Rather

This book is especially relevant during this campaign.

Rachel Maddow

Gail Collins is the funniest serious political commentator in America. Reading AsTexas Goes...is pure pleasure from page one.

Frank Rich

There's no funnier writer about politics than Gail Collins, and in Texas, she's found the perfect canvas. The state's record at producing some of the nuttiest characters ever to enter American public life is matched only by its recent prowess in infecting the other 49 states with those politicians' most crackpot policy ideas. Collins serves up hilarity and horror in equal measure and leaves you rooting for Rick Perry to make good on his threat to lead Texas out of the Union.

Anthony Lewis

There is no one like Gail Collins: uproarious fun on every page, but with a serious point. In this wonderful book she devastates Texas for its hypocrisy, its ignorance, its worship of wealth. But you cannot keep laughing as she shows how the Texan mind works a baleful influence on the rest of the country.

Editorial Reviews

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. (June)

Publishers Weekly

"Gail Collins is the funniest serious political commentator in America. Reading As Texas Goes… is pure pleasure from page one."

Rachel Maddow

"There's no funnier writer about politics than Gail Collins, and in Texas, she's found the perfect canvas. The state's record at producing some of the nuttiest characters ever to enter American public life is matched only by its recent prowess in infecting the other 49 states with those politicians' most crackpot policy ideas. Collins serves up hilarity and horror in equal measure and leaves you rooting for Rick Perry to make good on his threat to lead Texas out of the Union."

Frank Rich

"The reader who senses a touch of sarcasm would not be wrong…[Collins] has a good eye for absurd details."

New York Times - Erica Grieder

"Collins lays out a convincing case that many of the nation’s more misguided—sometimes outright wacky—policies originated in Texas, ranging from public education to environmental regulation to teaching kids about sex… Worth a read."

Louisville Courier-Journal - Deborah Yetter

"There is no one like Gail Collins: uproarious fun on every page, but with a serious point. In this wonderful book she devastates Texas for its hypocrisy, its ignorance, its worship of wealth. But you cannot keep laughing as she shows how the Texan mind works a baleful influence on the rest of the country."

Anthony Lewis

"With wit and humor, Collins focuses on major Texas figures, from Davy Crockett to Rick Perry, to offer a portrait of an outsize state anxious to take on the task of setting the rest of the country straight and of the broader implications that has for the rest of the country."

Booklist

"New York Times columnist Gail Collins makes a compelling case in As Texas Goes… that much of what ails the nation began down in the Lone Star State."

Boston Globe - Steve Almond

"[Collins] set off on a whirlwind tour to discover the Lone Star State and its transcendent meaning, deploying a breezy, wisecracking polemical style familiar to fans (including me) of her twice-­weekly column in The Times."

New York Times Book Review - Lloyd Grove

Gail Collins is the funniest serious political commentator in America. Reading As Texas Goes . . . is pure pleasure from page one.”—Rachel Maddow
 
“There’s no funnier writer about politics than Gail Collins, and in Texas she’s found the perfect canvas. The state’s record at producing some of the nuttiest characters ever to enter American public life is matched only by its recent prowess in infecting the other forty-nine states with those politicians’ most crackpot policy ideas. Collins serves up hilarity and horror in equal measure and leaves you rooting for Rick Perry to make good on his threat to lead Texas out of the Union.”—Frank Rich
 
“Here is the WPA guide to the follies of our time. Gail Collins walks us through a vast and formerly prosperous land that has lost itself in delusions of its own magnificence; that has set itself ablaze with a crusade against learning; that has grown dizzy with free-market fantasies that no amount of real-world failure seems able to correct. Yes, Texas is a hell of a place to be a corporation, but for humans it’s a different story.” —Thomas Frank, author of What’s the Matter with Kansas?
 
“There is no one like Gail Collins: uproarious fun on every page, but with a serious point. In this wonderful book she devastates Texas for its hypocrisy, its ignorance, its worship of wealth. But you cannot keep laughing as she shows how the Texan mind works a baleful influence on the rest of the country.”—Anthony Lewis

From the Publisher

So you think the nation's political divide is between the coasts and the heartland? The Christian Far Right and the rest of us? The one percent and the 99 percent? Nope. Collins (columnist, New York Times; When Everything Changed) takes us to the source: Texas. With her characteristic wry amusement, Collins observes a state where politicians hew to an "ideology of empty places," even as 80 percent of the country lives in/near its major cities. As Collins puts it, Texas says, "You leave me alone and I'll leave you alone." Trouble is, she goes on to note, Texas is not actually leaving us alone. From financial deregulation to strong-arming national textbook publishers to follow Texas mores on sex education, guns, and God, to the swagger of Texan U.S. presidents who have dragged more than Texas into war, to meager insurance coverage of its people, and massive job numbers at or below the minimum wage, to pro-oil and antiglobal warming initiatives, Texas has preached states' rights, while its national players, from Tom Delay to Phil Gramm, George W. Bush, and Rick Perry, promote their agendas nationally. Collins maps the invasion of Texas credos into our lives and into the U.S. financial, medical, educational, political, military, and legal infrastructure. The prognosis for Texas's future influence is less clear; the state will be majority Latino soon. Will that bring change? VERDICT A fascinating book, written with great wit and a power to disturb. Essential reading before November. [See Prepub Alert, 12/5/11.]—Margaret Heilbrun, Library Journal

Library Journal

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

AUGUST 2012 - AudioFile

New York Times political columnist Collins (When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present, 2009, etc.) zeroes in on what makes Texas so important and why the rest of the country needs to know and care about what's happening there. Texans, writes the author, think they live in a wide-open empty space where carrying a concealed weapon is acceptable because people have to take care of themselves, and the government has no business telling them what to do. In her inimitable style, the unabashed liberal examines the shenanigans of Texans from four angles: first, a hilarious look at some of Texas' past heroes and present politicos and at how the empty-space ethos has shaped the state's policies; second, a close-up examination of several areas wheres she says the state has gone wildly, sadly wrong (its deregulation of financial markets, attempts at reforming schools and funding, or defunding, education, and major missteps on sex education, energy, the environment, pollution and global climate change); third, a scathing report on the two-tiered, low-tax, low-service economy of the state; and finally, Collins' take on where Texas, soon to be a Hispanic-majority state, is heading. The author loads her report with funny but dismaying anecdotes and dozens of revealing interviews. She does not neglect the hard facts. An appendix includes "Texas on the Brink," a report compiled by the Legislative Study Group of the Texas House of Representatives. It gives an especially grim picture of the failings of our second-largest state. Among the states, it is first in executions and in the amount of carbon dioxide emissions but 45th in SAT scores and 49th in the percentage of low-income people covered by Medicaid. In Collins' view, the rest of us feel the influence of Texas in our lives every day, and "if Texas goes south, it's taking us along." A timely portrait of Texas delivered with Collins' unique brand of insightful humor.

Kirkus Reviews