I just finished LAST CAVALIER and without question consider it the best biography I've read in years. This book may well signal John Lomax's overdue emergence as a national treasure for his collecting and preserving of thousands of cowboy songs including "Home on the Range"--as well as for bringing musical artists like Leadbelly to national attention. Lomax already is a treasure in his home state of Texas. If you're a reading Texan and/or have any interest whatsoever in country or black music, the roots of American folklore, the ambiance of the Texas mileau in the first half of this century, or a profound character study of one of the country's great promoters of native culture, this uncompromising biography was written for you. However, the book transcends regionalism both in the writing and its universal perspective and message. One practically has to go to Flaubert's rendering of Emma Bovary to find such an incisive pyschological study of someone so well-meaning and successful, and yet so flawed, as John Lomax. Porterfield makes his character so relatable and understandable that we can love and hate him at the same time--and even identify with this American original, if only from a distance. The author also renders his impeccably researched material with all the skill and technique of a first-rate novelist. He is as authoratative and compelling in his treatment of Lomax as James Boswell was with Samuel Johnson.

Nolan Porterfield's book _A Way of Knowing_ is brilliantly evocative of both West Texas and the lives of the people there. I grew up in Lubbock, and his descriptions and dialogue are spookily accurate, although they describe a West Texas that's almost disappeared since the post-WWII era when the book is set. Porterfield is perceptive, unblinking, and yet generous in portraying the hearts of the men trying to make lives for themselves in this hardscrabble landscape.

If you like books by Larry McMurtry, be sure to read _A Way of Knowing_ -- it's a darn sight better than even McMurtry's best. This book won awards when it came out, and it deserves to be rediscovered now that it's back in print.