PositiveThe Dallas Morning NewsTo say that Bryan Mealer's The Kings of Big Spring is a sprawling family saga is something of an understatement. It takes two pages of genealogical trees to identify the Mealers through the decades, and the timeline covers nearly a century and a quarter … Mealer includes several portraits of men who made fortunes in the oil business, men like Josh Cosden and Raymond Tollett — while the Mealers kept struggling to stay afloat … Writers about Texas seem drawn to big-scale stories, and Mealer's family-based narrative stands alongside other recent epic-sized efforts to extract drama from pioneers to the present, books like Roger D. Hodge's Texas Blood and Philipp Meyer's The Son.
