Law and disorder

Though well-written, Cult of Glory isn't a book for the fainthearted

Larry McMurtry’s epic Lonesome Dove, about a great cattle drive from Texas to Montana in the 1870s, deservedly won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1986. The novel’s protagonists were Woodrow Call and Augustus McCrae, former Texas Rangers who embodied the mythic cowboy traits of being loyal and fierce fighters, courageous frontiersmen for the ages.

You won’t find such admirable Rangers in Doug J Swanson’s smashup of Texas’ law enforcement legends. In Cult of Glory, Mr Swanson, a former Dallas Morning News reporter, now a journalism professor at the University of Pittsburgh, scorches the reputations of such legendary Rangers as