The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 94, July 1990 - April, 1991 Page: 648
692 p. : ill. (some col.), maps, ports. ; 23 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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Southwestern Historical Quarterly
jet-set travels than his business concerns. The other, Clint, Jr., became
a pathological business risk-taker, involving himself and his brother in
ever more complicated and unsound ventures. Between the two of
them, they managed to turn a $350 million economic empire into a pile
of debt.
The book is thorough and clearly written. Its major flaw, from the
standpoint of scholars, is Wolfe's lack of acquaintance with academic
studies pertinent to her subject. She seems ignorant, to take only two
examples, of research published in the 198os on the business strategies
of independent oil producers, or the politics of the Texas Railroad
Commission. Academic readers must therefore read this saga for its ex-
tensive information, not for its conceptual sophistication. Nonacademic
readers will not care, and will enjoy it.
University of Texas at Austin DAVID F. PRINDLE
No Name on the Bullet: A Biography of Audze Murphy. By Don Graham.
(New York: Viking Press, 1989. Pp. xvi+396. Preface, acknowledg-
ments, photographs, epilogue, filmography, notes, index. $19.95.)
At the end of World War II, Texans had ample reason to celebrate a
native son whose battlefield heroics were every bit the stuff of legend as
those immortals enshrined at the Alamo. Unlike Bowie, Crockett, or
Travis, however, Audie Murphy survived his legend-making exploits
and for the next twenty-six years lived precariously at the edge of the
American dream. By the time his life was cut short in a plane crash in
1971, America's most-decorated war hero had little meaning for a new
generation traumatized by the quagmire of Vietnam. So too did Audie
Murphy the movie actor, once ranked among the top ten most popular
stars in America, become an anachronism with the deterioration of the
"B" Western that had dominated much of his Hollywood career.
World War II and Hollywood are only the most visible facets of a re-
markable life that Don Graham recounts in this perceptive and moving
biography. Having researched pertinent archival materials in Texas
and Southern California and conducted numerous interviews, Graham
delivers an engrossing, full-bodied portrait of a poor sharecropper's
son whose slight physique and demeanor of boyish innocence belied a
restless craving for excitement and a killer's instinct that in wartime
won him every medal his grateful country could offer, but when com-
bined with post-combat syndrome made life difficult thereafter. Profes-
sionally responsible and talented as a soldier and actor, generous and
loyal to friends, Murphy was also violently quick-tempered, a crude
practical jokester, notorious womanizer, compulsive gambler, and "gun648
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 94, July 1990 - April, 1991, periodical, 1991; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth101214/m1/726/: accessed March 28, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.