𝔖 Bobbio Scriptorium
✦   LIBER   ✦

Cover of Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen: reflections at sixty and beyond

Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen: reflections at sixty and beyond

✍ Scribed by Larry McMurtry


Publisher
Simon & Schuster
Year
1999
Tongue
English
Weight
150 KB
Category
Fiction
ISBN
0684870193

No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.

✦ Synopsis


In a lucid, brilliant work of nonfiction -- as close to an autobiography as his readers are likely to get -- 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 as a springboard 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...