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2 books match the query '1896-1974'
Bob Kleberg and the King Ranch
A Worldwide Sea of GrassBy John Cypher
University of Texas Press, 1996
Ranching on the vast scale that Texas is famous for actually happened at King Ranch, a sea of grass that ultimately spread its pastures to countries around the globe under the fifty-year leadership of Bob Kleberg. This absorbing biography, written by Kleberg's top assistant of many years, captures both the life of the man and the spirit of the kingdom he ruled, offering a rare, insider's view of life on a fabled Texas ranch.
John Cypher spent forty years (1948-1988) on King Ranch. In these pages, he melds highlights of Kleberg's life with memories of his own experiences as the "right hand" who implemented many of Kleberg's grand designs. In a lively story laced with fascinating anecdotes he both recounts his worldwide travels with Kleberg as the ranch expanded its holdings to Latin America, Cuba, Australia, the Philippines, Europe, and Africa, and describes timeless, traditional tasks such as roundup at the home ranch in Kingsville.
Kleberg's accomplishments as the founder of the Santa Gertrudis cattle breed and a breeder of Thoroughbred racing horses receive full attention, as does his fabled lifestyle, which included friendships not merely with the rich and famous but also with Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, who shared his love of horse racing. For everyone interested in ranching and one of its most famous practitioners, this book will be essential reading.
Undertones of War
Edmund Blunden
University of Chicago Press, 2007
In Undertones of War, one of the finest autobiographies to come out of World War I, the acclaimed poet Edmund Blunden records his devastating experiences in combat. After enlisting at the age of twenty, he took part in the disastrous battles at the Somme, Ypres, and Passchendaele, describing them as “murder, not only to the troops but to their singing faiths and hopes.”
All the horrors of trench warfare, all the absurdity and feeble attempts to make sense of the fighting, all the strangeness of observing war as a writer—of being simultaneously soldier and poet—pervade Blunden’s memoir. In steely-eyed prose as richly allusive as any poetry, he tells of the endurance and despair found among the men of his battalion, including the harrowing acts of bravery that won him the Military Cross.
Now back in print for American readers, the volume includes a selection of Blunden’s war poems that unflinchingly juxtapose death in the trenches with the beauty of Flanders’s fields. Undertones of War deserves a place on anyone’s bookshelf between Siegfried Sassoon’s poetry and Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That.