{"product_id":"the-kings-of-big-spring-god-oil-and-one-familys-search-for-the-american-dream","title":"The Kings of Big Spring: God  Oil  and One Family's Search for the American Dream","description":"\u003cp\u003e\"Think of it as a Texas version of Hillbilly Elegy.\"  Bryan Burrough  New York Times bestselling author of THE BIG RICH and BARBARIANS AT THE GATE  \"Bryan Mealer has given us a brilliant  and brilliantly entertaining  portrayal of family  and a bursting-at-the-seams chunk of America in the bargain.  Ben Fountain  bestselling author of Billy Lynns Long Halftime Walk  A saga of family  fortune  faith in Texas  where blood is bond and oil is king  In 1892  Bryan Mealers 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 authors 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  Howd 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 Springs 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  Bobbys 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 Gradys 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 backsliders 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. And in telling the story of four generations of his family  Mealer also tells the story of America came to be.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44985944539189,"sku":"ByrdShop_1250058910","price":26.72,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9781250058911.jpg?v=1770878606","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/the-kings-of-big-spring-god-oil-and-one-familys-search-for-the-american-dream","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}