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Cult of Glory: The Bold and Brutal History of the Texas Rangers
Maybe someday
46
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
31/100Critics
60/100Scholars
Author:
Doug J. Swanson
Publisher:
Viking
Date:
June 9, 2020
A twenty-first-century reckoning with the legendary Texas Rangers that does justice to their heroic moments while also documenting atrocities, brutality, and corruption.
What The Reviewers Say
... densely researched.
Swanson is adept at holding readers’ interest in a sweeping narrative, all the while allowing a nuanced understanding of these myths. The book loses some momentum in the final chapters in telling 20th-century history; by then the myths were ingrained in public imagination.
Though well-written, Cult of Glory isn’t a book for the fainthearted. Swanson, a prodigious researcher, recounts how in their nearly 200-year “attention-grubbing” history Rangers burned peasant villages, slaughtered innocents, busted unions and committed war crimes.
... will thus surely discomfit some of those who pick it up, even as it confirms for others their sense that the Rangers frequently served as anything but impartial arbiters of justice..
