A Personal Country

by A.C. Greene

This book brings alive what one man feels about his childhood home. The place is West Texas, seen across a long vista in which today’s events and people merge with the author’s boyhood and young manhood.

It is a harsh, remote country, where the weather is always very close and the horizon far away. The Brazos country of long-ago Fourth of July fishing expeditions; the grass-grown remains of a way station of the Butterfield Stage Line; the streets of Abilene; the sparse grazing lands under infinite skies—all are made resonant by a native son’s affection and understanding. It is a way of life—resilient and persnickety—that is almost gone.

Above all, it is people: the author’s grandmother, who had a mortal fear of bridges and whose premonitions of unnamed calamities (that as often as not happened), both alarmed and pleased the young boy; Uncle Aubrey, “who married late”; the blacksmith they awakened in the dead of night; the familiar neighbors; the rare and deliciously mysterious strangers.

With humor and strong, unsentimental feeling, A. C. Greene conserves for us the priceless eccentricities of place and person that are being flattened out—almost literally bulldozed away—by the impatient, insatiable onrush of the twentieth century. His West Texas is a very personal country, but what he seeks to share will be familiar to all who take pleasure in the memories that tie them to their own special region of America.

Genres: Nonfiction

328 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 1979

About the author

A.C. Greene (Alvin Carl Greene, Jr.) was an American writer — important in Texas literary matters as a memoirist, fiction writer, historian, poet, and influential book critic in Dallas. As a newspaper journalist, he had been a book critic and editor of the Editorial Page for the Dallas Times Herald when JKF was assassinated, which galvanized his role at the paper to help untangle and lift a demoralized city in search of its soul. Leaving full-time journalism in 1968, Greene went on to become a prolific author of books, notably on Texas lore and history. His notoriety led to stints in radio and TV as talk-show host. By the 1980s, his commentaries were being published by major media across the country. He had become a sought-after source for Texas history, antidotes, cultural perspective, facts, humor, books, and politics. When the 1984 Republican National Convention was held in Dallas, Greene granted sixty-three interviews about Texas topics to major media journalists. Greene's 1990 book, Taking Heart — which examines the experiences of the first patient in a new heart transplant center (himself) — made the New York Times Editors Choice list.

Reviews

[Janet · Rating 5 out of 5]

An online post quoted the opening lines from this book, drawing me to lost but remembered landscapes. A. C. Greene's literary voice might sound at first pretentious with its soaring vocabulary and some long and winding roads of sentences, many of which I had to traverse twice. But it was worth the drive when I came to rest in thought and the mindscape of his well-crafted prose. Plus, I knew that voice from years of reading his column in The Dallas Morning News whenever I could, for that paper was too heavy to be mailed daily to me.

"When I left West Texas, it didn't leave me" would best describe theme of his road trip back as he writes of ghost towns, trees, churches, cars, Texas history all the way back to the Butterfield stage line, oil booms and busts, droughts and floods, Greyhound bus rides, rivers, old friends and remembrances of strangers, interlaced with plenty of Texas lore. And his family. At times I had to set down the book and laugh out loud at the tales he could tell of his parents, aunts and uncles, and most of all, his Grandmother Cole. Replanted back to West Texas after surviving the Galveston hurricane of 1900, she became a librarian, and the Abilene Carnegie Library became the author's second home. She served to motivate others, telling them they were "Given a Gift" and had "Something to Say."

The hardback copy is only available format and prevents sharing my numerous highlights but the gist of the value of regional relationship lies in this one:

"Learning to know ourselves through where and when and who we have been teaches us to endure our share of the common iniquity, because we discover how very much of it everyone else is sharing."

[Dan Hays · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read this book years ago when it first came out, remembered it fondly. I was surprised to find that when reading it again the awkward writing style intruded tremendously. There were awkward and lengthy sentences that led to awkward and lengthy paragraphs that just seemed to wander through the author's memory, sometimes with little direction. It was like listening to a lecture by a stodgy old professor who sometimes got off topic and didn't realize it. It was a struggle to make myself finish this book.

[Matthew · Rating 2 out of 5]

Humorless author A.C. Greene is a respected man of Texas letters, and in this book he has recorded every memory and fact he has of the West Texas region (98% of them mundane).

[Aubrey Caudill · Rating 5 out of 5]

fantastic read, highly recommend if you are interested in small pieces of west Texas history.