Book‘s rocking my world. It’s about the last of the greatest Indian tribes of the southern U.S. plains — the Comanches — and written by S.C. Gwynne, a former editor-in-chief of Texas Monthly. The book was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2010.

It chronicles, with present-day geography tips, the battles, skirmishes, life of the Comanches along the bleeding frontier that existed in Texas as Americans moved west up against the southern great plains and the master-horsemen that the Comanches had become. In the 1800s, they had become the dominant Indian tribe in the southern plains, which contained the fullest herds of buffalo. At that time, millions of buffalo thundered the vast, weathered plains of the U.S.

The book gives new meaning to growing up in Texas. Just a hundred years removed from all this, I came into the world in that town that still felt like a frontier. There’s a wild, chaotic and magical energy there still. It’s at the edge of the 98th meridian, west of which rainfall was sparse enough to prevent the trees that grew east. And no trees meant buffalo and white-out blizzards, oceanic grasslands, hardscrabble land broken by clear, crystal streams and canyons upon that limestone upland called the “llano estacado.”