What reviewers are saying about:
 

Stephen F. Austin
Empresario of Texas




 
 
 

"The first critical study in 75 years of the founder of Anglo-American Texas--an appealing figure who here has gained a shrewd and skilled biographer. . . . This readable, always compelling, learned biography takes us deep into Mexican history and throws much light on the 19th-century American southwest. But most important, it also brings alive this complex, honorable, politically savvy loner who, haltered to the values and aspirations of his overbearing father, transformed parental expectations into a historically enduring project. A solid achievement of biographical art and modern western history that substitutes new evidence and current scholarship where myth and romance have long held sway." 

---Kirkus Reviews, August 1999

 
 

"Cantrell's prose is lively is lively and engaging, but ever the historian, he makes excellent use of primary sources in the United States and Mexico. . . . a compelling and engaging account that will appeal both to the lay reader and scholar. Highly recommended.
 
--Daniel D. Liestman, Library Journal, August 1999

 
 

"While Stephen F. Austin has long been revered as the 'father of Texas,' his image as an austere, bland organizer has denied him the passionate affection many Texans feel for the more colorful 'man of action,' Sam Houston.  Cantrell has provided an interesting and better-rounded picture in the first full-length biography of Austin in more than 70 years.  While Cantrell is generally effective in linking the man to the great events swirling around him, he is clearly intent on concentrating primarily on Austin's personality.  Austin is revealed here as an attractive but complex and frustratingly enigmatic figure. . . .  For both historians and general readers, this is an engrossing study of an important and, surprisingly, often-neglected icon."
 
--Jay Freeman, Booklist, September 1999

 
 
 

"In 1925, Eugene C. Barker's 'Life of Stephen F. Austin' established him in the public mind as the 'Father of Texas,' but Austin has remained something of a cardboard statesman, marched dutifully through generations of history texts.
    Now Gregg Cantrell, the Rupert N. Richardson Professor of History at Hardin-Simmons University in Abilene, Tex., has produced a biography of Stephen F. Austin that rescues its subject from this pallid fate.  By the time Cantrell sketches for us the election defeat of 1836, the reader has gained such a sure and clear sense of Austin the man that his graciousness in the face of this repudiation comes as no surprise.
    This is not to say that Cantrell's portrait of Austin is a uniformly positive one.  Austin had his faults, and Cantrell repeatedly identifies self-pity as one of them.  But he reveals the myriad challenges that Austin met in establishing his colonies in what was then remote northern Mexico and in attempting to steer a diplomatic course through political reverses and chaos to Texas independence. . . .What Cantrell has given us is an elegantly researched and reasoned portrait of a man who could say with justification, 'My object has been the general good, and the permanent liberty and prosperity of Texas.'"
 
--Paula Mitchell Marks, New York Times, September 1999

 
 
 

"This biography of Stephen F. Austin, the second in 73 years, appears in time for his 206th birthday Nov. 3. It should be well-received among his friends who gather annually to honor him at San Felipe, the town he established in 1824 on the Brazos River just north of the present Interstate 10. . . Cantrell, a professor of history at Hardin-Simmons University in Abilene, uses interpretation and many more sources than those available to Barker to develop the character of Austin and his father, Moses, and place the pair in the context of their times. . . .
    The Austins come alive with doubts, mistakes, large and small victories, and moments of despair. The author reveals a sophisticated and cosmopolitan father and son who use the Hispanic system of government already in place in Texas to achieve their goals. . . .
    Cantrell, an excellent researcher and historical interpreter, presents an in-depth picture of the Austin family as it moved west to meet its new challenges. This scholarly book reads like a novel as Cantrell develops the characters and leads the reader through intricate politics and struggles in the United States and Mexican Texas. He uses apt quotations from documents to set scenes.
    The author has added an interesting epilogue that examines Austin as "Father of Texas" and his 19th-century detractors. In an appendix, Cantrell offers brief notes about what happened to a number of Austin's contemporaries after the death of the empresario in 1836; some of the footnotes are as interesting as the text.
    All in all, a fine book."
--Margaret Swett Henson, Houston Chronicle, September 1999

 
 
 

"Gregg Cantrell's solid new biography of Stephen F. Austin shows his initial motivation in coming to Texas was other than to father a republic. . . . Cantrell's balanced new look at Austin is a fundamentally important work for anyone seeking to understand the early history of Texas.
    Cantrell's book should stand as the new definitive biography of Austin.  It is well-researched and written, and casts much new light on the personality of the man who always will be known as the Father of Texas . . . "
  
--Mike Cox, Austin American-Statesman, October 1999

 
 
 

 " . . . a lively, minutely researched and smoothly written work. . . . Stephen F. Austin: Empresario of Texas is a rewarding trip through history, a revealing account of one man's transformation from a businessman into a world-class statesman."
 
--Robert Nash, Dallas Morning News, October 1999

 
 
 

"Gregg Cantrell has tackled a sacred cow and come out unscathed.  His new book, Stephen F. Austin, Empresario of Texas, is a meticulously researched and carefully written profile of a man we only thought we knew. . . .
    . . . Cantrell brings to life the real Stephen F. Austin with all his strengths and foibles . . . . If you have ever wondered why there was an Alamo, Goliad or San Jacinto, then you should read this book. . . ." 

--Randell Tarín, Alamo de Parras website, October 1999

 
 
 

"To generations of Texas schoolchildren, Stephen F. Austin has been a remote icon, 'Father of Texas'--but not quite human.  In most of our minds, he is a withdrawn, lonely political figure, brave but enigmatic--scarcely to be compared with Sam Houston, who was combative, a drinker and something of a wencher.  Stephen F. Austin never married and, somehow, we can't picture him as romantically inclined.
    Dr. Gregg Cantrell, Rupert N. Richardson professor of history at Hardin-Simmons University, has written Stephen F. Austin, Empresario of Texas, in which he offers a different Stephen F. Austin:  a much more human and less isolated man who did all kinds of human things (such as falling in love) that other biographers have neglected to mention. . . .
    Dr. Cantrell's inspection of Austin's early life is revealing and meaningful.  Some episodes generally overlooked in Austin's life included his feeling of aristocracy, his attachment to the eastern United States and the burden of his unreliable father, Moses Austin. . . .
    Though the book is not without controversy, the Austin we discover in this new biography is more understandable and, perhaps, more noble because he is a human, not a graven image."
 
--A.C. Greene, Dallas Morning News, November 1999

 
 
 

"Professor Gregg Cantrell, who holds the Rupert N. Richardson Chair of History at Hardin-Simmons University in Abilene, did not fall into the various modernist traps.  He nods to the now-aging 'Western revisionists,' as a proper academic must, and he understands the perils of ignoring PC, but he writes with the skeptical eye that good biographers must possess toward both primary sources and other writers before him.  The result is a splendid and long-overdue new life of the acknowledged Father of (Anglo) Texas. . . .
    Biographer-historians often attempt to dismiss their subjects as 'men of their times,' as if this explains anything.  Cantrell has much too good an eye, too keen a sensibility, to pass Austin off in this way. . . .
    Through exhaustive documentation, author Cantrell creates a clear picture of the man and the statesman he was forced to become in the cesspool (or boar's nest, if you prefer) of 1830s Mexican politics.
    Austin wrote well, at times lyrically (he anticipated computer nerds by being unable to punctuate or spell), and he reveals himself to a biographer of Cantrell's skill with the energy to sift and weigh interminable evidence.
    Cantrell has not made Austin into Texas' hero -- but he makes us re-realize that Austin indeed was father to the Texas that came to be. . . .
    Cantrell is especially effective in cutting through much nonsense about Texas and the frontier.  Austin's colony was an extension of the Gulf South, and the Texas of 1836 overwhelmingly represented two Southern strains:  the Black Belt and the hardscrabble hills of Kentucky and Tennessee. . . .
    This book should be in every Texana library.  At today's prices, it's a bargain.  Buy it."
 
--T.R. Fehrenbach, San Antonio Express-News, December 1999

 
 
 

"Cantrell's life of Stephen Austin represents the only significant treatment of Austin since Eugene C. Barker's biography of the "Founder of Texas" appeared in 1925. . . .  Cantrell recasts the empresario as a living being rather than a sphinx of marble or bronze. . . .
     Cantrell's work lies grounded in thorough research in Mexican and US archival sources.  It presents Austin as a moving part in American and Mexican history, rather than a figurine in a display case of heroism.  It gives Austin depth deprived him in generations of seventh-grade Texas history texts.  It delineates Austin's place in the often esoteric battlefield of US, Mexican, Southern and New West historiography.  And it makes all of this accessible and readable to layman and scholar alike."
--Ricky Dobbs, H-Net Reviews, December 1999

 
 
 

"The Stephen Austin of Cantrell's biography is not Eugene Barker's selfless champion of American expansion.  He often betrayed an unattractive blend of self-promotion and self-pity.  As he tried to hold the political center, he forsook his own doubts about slavery for a public position of virulent racism.  The Texas he created had no room for the Indian peoples who would be pushed to the edge of disaster within a general or two.
    Cantrell's Austin has, however, a complexity that will make him a more appealing--and certainly a more human and interesting--character to most readers. . . ."
 
Elliott West, History Book Club Reviews, December 1999

 
 
 
 

"Cantrell writes clearly and well . . . . the familiar story of Texas history is reprised in all its particulars, perhaps more coherently than ever before.  Through the progression from the initial transplanting of 300 white families in Mexican Texas in 1821 to the birth of the short-lived republic 15 years later, the reader accrues admiration for Stephen Austin, even a sense of wonder about him. . . ."
--Larry Swindell, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, January 2000

 
 
 

"This book makes an important contribution to biography, to Texas history, and to the history of the American West.  It should stand as the definitive biography of Austin, clearly superseding Eugene C. Barker's The Life of Stephen F. Austin (1925).  Explanatory endnotes and an extensive bibliography enhance the value of this well-written and informative book. . . ."
--L.B. Gimelli, Choice