Return with us to yesteryear, when cowboys were cowboys and 
gunslingers lurked around every corner. Today that colorful period 
continues to resonate in the collective imagination of red-blooded 
Americans everywhere—and now we have True West, which 
illustrates, in hundreds of full-color illustrations, how America's 
mass media stamped that vision so indelibly on our collective 
unconscious over the past century, into today.

    Boasting hundreds of rare and colorful movie posters, pulp 
magazines, comic books, comic strips, television memorabilia, 
advertisements, paperback books, record album jackets, toys, and 
clothing, True West covers such hugely popular television series 
as Gunsmoke, The Lone Ranger, and Bonanza, along with classic 
western novels, including Shane, The Searchers, Welcome to Hard 
Times, and that epic of all epics, Lonesome Dove. It also bows to 
the icons who ruled the silver screen—Tom Mix, Gene Autry, Roy 
Rogers, John Wayne, and Clint Eastwood, to name a few.

    And what would the Wild West be without an accompanying 
soundtrack? True West reproduces the sublime album covers and 
sheet music that served up classic odes like "Streets of Laredo" and 
"Cool Water," narrative ballads like "El Paso" (with Marty Robbins 
bedecked in his black gunfighter togs on the cover!), and "High Noon."

_________________________________________________________

MICHAEL BARSON has a Ph.D. in American Culture and is the 
author of more than a dozen celebrations of American popular 
culture, including Better Dead Than Red!, Teenage Confidential, and 
Lost, Lonely & Vicious. He has contributed articles to Entertainment 
Weekly and American Film and to such NPR shows as Morning 
Edition and Fresh Air. Barson grew up in Eisenhower-era 
Massachusetts but despite that is well aware how good a Shiner 
Bock on ice can taste.



Of Related Interest



STATE FARE

978-0-87565-367-9 HARDCOVER

$8.95

EXTRAORDINARY TEXAS WOMEN

978-0-87565-366-2 HARDCOVER

$8.95



TEXAS COUNTRY SINGERS

978-0-87565-365-5 HARDCOVER

$8.95