It is one of Burrough's aims in The Big Rich to separate truth from stereotype, a task he performs meticulously and occasionally amusingly. Like most stereotypes, this one contains elements of truth as well as exaggeration and condescension. Still more dimensions were added during the administration of Bush II, with gun-slinging cowpokes swaggering into foreign territories and vast conglomerates raking in the profits from these international adventures. It was as if American had acquired an exotic new animal for the national zoo, Texas oilicus.' The stereotype persisted for years, indeed is widely believed in to this day, though it has expanded to include 'secretive oil billionaires plotting an ultraconservative takeover of America,' the 'alternately kooky and villainous portrayals of Texans in Dallas and movies such as Doctor Strangelove and Oliver Stone's JFK,' Texas 'millionaires who were seen as unlettered, uncouth know-it-alls,' and 'the Evil Texas Oilman' engineering assassinations and other vile deeds.

As Bryan Burrough summarizes it in The Big Rich: 'The mass media's discovery of ultrawealthy Texas oilmen in 1948, and the resulting caricature of flamboyant, jet-setting billionaires popularized in Giant, introduced the country to a new regional archetype - funny, silly, harmless Texans who rode ostriches, wooed Hollywood stars, and scattered silver dollars on the sidewalks of Houston and Dallas like so much pocket lint. Jett Rink, a charmingly loutish wildcatter played by James Dean, strikes oil on a tiny patch of land, builds it into a vast empire, transforms himself into the epitome of nouveau-riche vulgarity and, in the climactic scene, makes a drunken fool of himself before an audience of other arrivistes brought together to celebrate his spectacular wealth. From The Washington Post's Book World/ Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley For me as doubtless for uncountable thousands of others, the image of oil-rich Texas was shaped for good by the second half of George Stevens's sprawling film 'Giant' (1956), adapted from Edna Ferber's bestselling novel.

The big rich by bryan burrough