The Murchisons:  The Rise and Fall of a Texas Dynasty by Jane Wolfe is a 505-page hardcover published by St. Martin's Press (New York), 1989.  The dust jacket has shelf wear and dampstaining along the bottom edge.  Inside, the book's pages are clean and unmarked with the exception of some dampstaining along the back endpaper that is purely aesthetic and does not affect the integrity of the construction.  The overall condition is good.

Book Summary

An intimate biography of one of America's richest families, The Murchinsons reveals the business, political, and sexual secrets of the ultimate Texas oil clan.  The rise and fall of the Murchinson family in three generations is a paradigm of Texas during the last half century, from boom to bust.

Clint Murchison, Sr., started as a country boy selling possum skins for pennies and became America's first conglomerateur:  oil fields, race tracks, hotels, real estate, publishing.  A friend of Dwight Eisenhower, Joseph McCarthy, Richard Nixon, J. Edgar Hoover, and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, he not only knew how to make millions but also how to spend them extravagantly on himself and his wives.

His son John increased the family fortune, developed the ski resort of Vail, won Wall Street's biggest proxy fight, and jet-setted around the world.  John's younger brother, the brilliant and wickedly witty Clint, Jr., created and built America's favorite football team, the Dallas Cowboys, while becoming almost as famous as a relentless adulterer.  Though Clint, Jr., shared his father's passion for making deals and greatly increased thew fortune using borrowed money, soaring interest rates and falling oil and real estate prices in the 1980s brought him to one of the largest personal bankruptcies in history.  Ironically, it was not outsiders who triggered the Murchisons' downfall, but the family itself.  When times turned tough, long-festering resentments int he third generation erupted into bitter intrafamily lawsuits. 

Much more than one family's biography, The Murchisons is a revealing documentary of the most dramatic chapter in Texas history.  The insights and strategies discovered in the Murchinsons' story provide valuable lessons for the business-oriented reader, as well as every reader who wants to learn how to learn how other people have profited from or been defeated by greed, genius, energy, lust, good and bad fortune, family, and love. 

ISBN:  0-312-03404-0