This is a good but imperfect chronicle of Houston’s unlikely journey from a backwater real estate play to a global industrial city. It succeeds as a detailed timeline of city history with plenty of dates and names for later reference. The writing itself is just fine and includes enough detail to give the facts some life. The book falters in the final chapter, “Conservatism and Culture,” which strays clumsily and briefly over the city’s troubled history of racial and social division. These topics played a major role in the city’s development and deserved more attention and better treatment in the book.