PositiveTexas Monthly... Minutaglio...leans hard—perhaps too hard—into the crowd-pleasing nature of Texas public life. This latest installment in UT Press’s Texas Bookshelf series...is a readable, even rollicking survey of a century and a half of political conflict. But though the narrative will offer surprises even for those who know the material well, it too often errs on the side of telling a good story over painting a richer portrait of its subject ... Emphasizing the visceral over the abstract and the personal over the structural makes A Single Star and Bloody Knuckles a page-turner. Minutaglio has no use for an academic historian’s need to analyze and classify political movements or issues. For him, the issues matter less than the fight itself ... The one exception—and it’s a big one, as the title indicates—is race. A Single Star and Bloody Knuckles places this fraught issue at the heart of Texas politics as a through line from the 1870s to the present ... Minutaglio’s tendency [is] to use anecdote, biographical sketches, and a journalist’s sharp eye for detail to relay the tenor of a decade ... Still, despite its interpretive problems, A Single Star and Bloody Knuckles does the vital work of presenting to a general audience a powerful argument for the centrality of race in the past, present, and future of Texas politics.
