The Kings of Big Spring
God, Oil, and One Family's Search for the American Dream
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Narrated by:
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Bryan Mealer
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By:
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Bryan Mealer
About this listen
This program is read by the author
"Think of it as a Texas version of Hillbilly Elegy." (Bryan Burrough, New York Times best-selling author of The Big Reach and Barbarians at the Gate)
A brilliant audiobook saga of family, fortune, and faith in Texas, where blood is bond and oil is king....
In 1892, Bryan Mealer's 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 author's 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, "How'd 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 Spring's 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, Bobby's 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 Grady's 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 backslider's 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. In telling the story of four generations of his family, Bryan Mealer also tells the story of how America came to be.
©2018 Bryan Mealer (P)2018 Macmillan AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
"With a Texas accent and a soft-spoken tone, Mealer recounts scenes of drinking and drugs, divorce, and tragedy...Mealer gives listeners a very personal history lesson, showing how changing times and economic cycles affect both a town and a family." (AudioFile Magazine)
"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, best-selling author of Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk)
"Mr. Mealer, who covered war in the Congo for the Associated Press and Harper’s magazine, has impressive reporter’s chops as well as a native West Texan’s gift for storytelling. The combination produces the best kind of twofer: an engaging history of the oil patch wrapped in an intimate portrait of his own family." (Wall Street Journal)
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Story
When the Second World War broke out, Ralph MacLean chose to escape his troubled life on the Magdalen Islands in eastern Canada and volunteer to serve his country overseas. Meanwhile, in Vancouver, Mitsue Sakamoto saw her family and her stable community torn apart after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
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Admirable progenitors
- By M. D. Baines on 04-24-18
By: Mark Sakamoto
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The House at Sugar Beach
- A Memoir
- By: Helene Cooper
- Narrated by: Helene Cooper
- Length: 9 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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At once a deeply personal memoir and an examination of a violent and stratified country, The House at Sugar Beach tells of tragedy, forgiveness, and transcendence with unflinching honesty and a survivor's gentle humor. And at its heart, it is a story of Helene Cooper's long voyage home.
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Can't recommend it
- By Taryn on 03-25-16
By: Helene Cooper
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Enrique's Journey
- By: Sonia Nazario
- Narrated by: Catherine Byers
- Length: 10 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Based on the Los Angeles Times newspaper series that won two Pulitzer Prizes, one for feature writing and another for feature photography, Enrique's Journey is the timeless story of families torn apart, the yearning to be together again, and a boy who will risk his life to find the mother he loves.
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Missing Chapter 8 and Epilogue!
- By Bobby Reed on 07-01-14
By: Sonia Nazario
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Close Range
- Wyoming Stories (Selected Unabridged Stories)
- By: Annie Proulx
- Narrated by: Frances Fisher, Bruce Greenwood, Campbell Scott
- Length: 5 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Annie Proulx's masterful language and fierce love of Wyoming are evident in this collection of stories about loneliness, quick violence, and wrong kinds of love. In "The Mud Below", a rodeo rider's obsession marks the deepening fissures between his family life and self-imposed isolation. In "The Half-Skinned Steer", an elderly fool drives west to the ranch he grew up on for his brother's funeral, and dies a mile from home.
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A Wonderfully Ironic and Surprising Read
- By Susan L. Stewart on 04-21-12
By: Annie Proulx
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Humboldt
- Life on America's Marijuana Frontier
- By: Emily Brady
- Narrated by: Dan Woren, Sonny Warner, Erin Bennett, and others
- Length: 7 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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In the vein of Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief and Deborah Feldman's Unorthodox, journalist Emily Brady journeys into a secretive subculture - one that marijuana built. Say the words "Humboldt County" to a stranger and you might receive a knowing grin. The name is infamous, and yet the place, and its inhabitants, have been nearly impenetrable. Until now. Humboldt is a narrative exploration of an insular community in Northern California, which for nearly 40 years has existed primarily on the cultivation and sale of marijuana.
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Great book!
- By David on 02-26-15
By: Emily Brady
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On the Road: The Original Scroll
- By: Jack Kerouac
- Narrated by: John Ventimiglia
- Length: 12 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Though Jack Kerouac began thinking about the novel that was to become On the Road as early as 1947, it was not until three weeks in April 1951, in an apartment on West 20th Street in Manhattan, that he wrote the first full draft that was satisfactory to him.
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A Classic Brought to Life
- By Sil A. on 11-25-16
By: Jack Kerouac
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Love and Other Ways of Dying
- Essays
- By: Michael Paterniti
- Narrated by: Richard Poe
- Length: 14 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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In the 17 wide-ranging essays collected for the first time in Love and Other Ways of Dying, he brings his full literary powers to bear, pondering happiness and grief, memory and the redemptive power of human connection. In the remote Ukranian countryside, Paterniti picks apples (and faces mortality) with a real-life giant; in Nanjing, China, he confronts a distraught jumper on a suicide bridge.
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Incredibly intimate voice for humanity
- By Ed Hodges on 01-02-16
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When a Crocodile Eats the Sun
- A Memoir of Africa
- By: Peter Godwin
- Narrated by: Peter Godwin
- Length: 12 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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After his father's heart attack in 1984, Peter Godwin began a series of pilgrimages back to Zimbabwe, the land of his birth, from Manhattan, where he now lives. On these frequent visits to check on his elderly parents, he bore witness to Zimbabwe's dramatic spiral downward into the jaws of violent chaos, presided over by an increasingly enraged dictator. And yet long after their comfortable lifestyle had been shattered and millions were fleeing, his parents refuse to leave, steadfast in their allegiance to the failed state that has been their adopted home for 50 years.
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Worth the listen.
- By SEE on 09-06-21
By: Peter Godwin
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That Old Ace in the Hole
- By: Annie Proulx
- Narrated by: Tom Stechschulte
- Length: 14 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner Annie Proulx's That Old Ace in the Hole is told through the eyes of Bob Dollar, a young Denver man trying to make good in a bad world. Dollar is out of college but aimless, when he takes a job with Global Pork Rind - his task to locate big spreads of land in the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles that can be purchased by the corporation and converted to hog farms.
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Doesn't work as a novel
- By Sarah C on 05-30-12
By: Annie Proulx
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Full Body Burden
- Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats
- By: Kristen Iversen
- Narrated by: Kirsten Potter, Kristen Iversen
- Length: 13 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Kristen Iversen grew up in a small Colorado town close to Rocky Flats, a secret nuclear weapons plant once designated "the most contaminated site in America." Full Body Burden is the story of a childhood and adolescence in the shadow of the Cold War, in a landscape at once startlingly beautiful and--unknown to those who lived there--tainted with invisible yet deadly particles of plutonium.
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A story that no one else wanted to tell.
- By Carol on 01-28-13
By: Kristen Iversen
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Hard Country
- A Novel
- By: Michael McGarrity
- Narrated by: George Guidall
- Length: 15 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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National best-selling author and New Mexico native Michael McGarrity takes listeners to the wild territory of the late 19th-century American Southwest for this epic tale. After the deaths of his wife and brother, John Kerney gives up his West Texas ranch and heads south in search of a new home. Soon Kerney is offered work trailing cattle to the New Mexico Territory - a job that will forever change his life.
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Hard Country lives up to it's title.
- By mar on 12-14-12
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An Hour Before Daylight
- Memories of a Rural Boyhood
- By: Jimmy Carter
- Narrated by: Jimmy Carter
- Length: 6 hrs and 50 mins
- Abridged
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In an American story of enduring importance, former President Jimmy Carter re-creates his Depression-era boyhood on a Georgia farm, before the civil rights movement that changed the country.
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A rare view of rural America
- By Samantha on 07-05-03
By: Jimmy Carter
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Once Upon a Town
- The Miracle of the North Platte Canteen
- By: Bob Greene
- Narrated by: Fritz Weaver
- Length: 6 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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During World War II, American soldiers from every city and walk of life rolled through North Platte, Nebraska, on troop trains, en route to Europe and the Pacific. The tiny town transformed its modest railroad depot into the North Platte Canteen, a place where soldiers could enjoy coffee, music, home-cooked food, magazines, and friendly conversation during a stopover that lasted only a few minutes.
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Long Tale of a Truly Inspiring Short Tale
- By Suzy on 02-25-11
By: Bob Greene
What listeners say about The Kings of Big Spring
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Nancy Nichols
- 01-18-19
Authors are not actors
An extremely well written fascinating story about an ordinary family surviving in Texas. it deserved a better narrator!
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- Sallye
- 01-17-21
Growing up in Midland
I was born in midland in 1943. All my family were ranchers. I saw oil booms & oil busts. Sandstorms were a way of life. Will never forget the 7 year drought of the fifties. My son recommended your book. I thoroughly enjoyed every word. Found myself getting weepy in parts. I think what makes a book good is when you don’t want it to end. That is how I feel about your book.
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- Jesse
- 04-30-18
Weaving Family History into the history of the land
This story goes far beyond just a genealogy of a family , it weaves together their unique history with that of a city, a state, and a country.
My family originated in the same place and the same time, so I found it personally interesting, putting detail to the old family stories about drought, plenty, and always the struggle to survive.
My grandfather’s family took a different path after selling much of the family farm to the refinery that figures so prominently in the story. I still have “cousins” working in the refinery.
A story that everyone should use as a model for their own family history.
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- A
- 07-25-22
A Family History
If enjoy a family window into the past you will love this book. It’s like going back into your childhood with fondest memories.
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- Herder Deb
- 03-06-23
Extremely interesting
What a great story about this family and town. History well written. Loved it to the end.
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- J
- 08-17-18
Not for me
This book is not what I expected. It is a very detailed recreation of decades of a families life; almost like it was written from a diary. But, I don't think it was. Is it historical fiction or what the author has pieced together from records and memories?
Either way, it really was slow and depressing , almost painfully at times. I quit listening several times, but came back thinking it will get better. But, for me, it did not. I found it to be a very 'negative' book, even given some of the very difficult historical periods it describes.
Perhaps I did not read the reviews carefully enough before I purchased it.
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- Gordon
- 02-20-19
Not on a par with Hillbilly Elegy
This book has all the charm of an extended sitting trapped watching someone’s home movies full of pictures of people you don’t know. Add to that a narrator who thinks he is interesting but drops his voice at the end of sentences “for emphasis “ only to make it difficult to understand him.
The book is a gossip filled “tell-all” that tells salacious details about real people. Portions of the book is reminiscent of “Wolves of Wall Street” set in West Texas. The self-destructive, wanton excess of people who find and loose money then die young is not my idea of an enjoyable read.
The book does a reasonably accurate job of capturing a slice of history including the oil boom and bust of the 80s in Texas. The book is also sprinkled with interesting “cameo appearances “ of persons like Bob Wills. However, even those appearances take on the flavor of name-dropping by someone who wants to impress you (see Weird Al’s song “Lame Claim to Fame”).
Unlike Hillbilly Elegy, there is not much here to explain the character and behavior of a swath of America. If you like reading stories of an endless parade of people making poor choices, this book is for you.
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