Synopses & Reviews
In the tradition of Ian Frazier’s Great Plains, and as vivid as the work of Cormac McCarthy, an intoxicating, singularly illuminating history of the Texas borderlands from their settlement through seven generations of Roger D. Hodge’s ranching family.
What brought the author’s family to Texas? What is it about Texas that for centuries has exerted a powerful allure for adventurers and scoundrels, dreamers and desperate souls, outlaws and outliers? In search of answers, Hodge travels across his home state — which he loves and hates in shifting measure — tracing the wanderings of his ancestors into forgotten histories along vanished roads. Here is an unsentimental, keenly insightful attempt to grapple with all that makes Texas so magical, punishing, and polarizing. Here is a spellbinding and evocative portrait of the borderlands — with its brutal history of colonization, conquest, and genocide; where stories of death and drugs and desperation play out daily. And here is a contemplation of what it means that the ranching industry that has sustained families like Hodge’s for almost two centuries is quickly fading away, taking with it a part of our larger, deep-rooted cultural inheritance. A wholly original fusion of memoir and history — as piercing as it is elegiac — Texas Blood is a triumph.
Review
“Hypnotically written, deeply researched, profoundly elegiac — the adverbs pile up, and with good reason. Roger D. Hodge has written a wonderful book about our most vexed and peculiarly American state, with an eye for detail and anecdote that’s as loving as it is merciless.” Tom Bissell, author of Apostle
Review
“A fusion of historical narrative, memoir, exposé, and lament, Texas Blood is a rigorously researched, compassionate examination of one of our country’s most polarizing states. Hodge casts an unflinching eye on the violence of the borderlands, yet does so with the tender lyricism and spiritual acumen of the best Cormac McCarthy. He deftly traverses the panoply of his home state’s shifting histories and landscapes while never losing sight of the individual: a suppliant walking barefoot, a child’s forgotten grave, the murdered body of a family friend. Texas Blood is a timely, important work: in grappling with Texas, Roger Hodge is holding America’s own deeply troubled feet to the fire.” Jamie Quatro, author of I Want to Show You More
Review
“Imagine finding out that the land where Cormac McCarthy set one of his most brutal novels was your family’s ranch...I’ve read loads of books about Texas but rarely encountered one so deeply of it, so deep the story escapes and becomes a treatise on the twisted American past, and the force exerted by that on our complex present.” John Jeremiah Sullivan, author of Pulphead
Review
“Heartbreaking and mesmerizing…Hodge combines a journalist’s eye with a native son’s love to give readers clear insight into southwestern Texas’s past, present, and future.” Publishers Weekly
About the Author
Roger D. Hodge is national editor of The Intercept and author of The Mendacity of Hope: Barack Obama and the Betrayal of American Liberalism. Formerly he was the editor of the Oxford American and Harper’s Magazine. Hodge’s writings have appeared in many publications, including Texas Monthly, The London Review of Books, Popular Science, The New Republic, and Harper’s. His essay “Blood and Time: Cormac McCarthy and the Twilight of the West” was a finalist for the National Magazine Award for criticism. He lives in Brooklyn.
Roger D. Hodge on PowellsBooks.Blog

Previously — despite the presence of barbed wire fences, “No Trespassing” signs, highways, and international boundaries — there was something wild and unfettered about the border country. Even as the towns and cities became cluttered with strip malls and fast-food joints, the land communicated a sense of liberty, of unrestricted movement and freedom of action, that was undeniable and intoxicating...
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