Having grown up in Pittsburgh and gone to school near Chicago and Toronto, Harvey Graff found Dallas unlike any city he had known when he took a university position there in 1975. This started a quest to find out what made Dallas so different from more familiar cities and led him to explore Dallas history to find the answer. That quest greatly frustrated him because he concluded that the city had paid little attention to its history and clung to what he termed myths – simplified history that celebrated business leadership and ignored the city's diversity and complex past. His book is an attempt to explain why this happened, show the consequences of that and suggest how it could be remedied.

Graff divides his book into two parts – searching for Dallas and understanding Dallas. Much of the first part attempts to deconstruct Dallas by closely exploring the city's images, discourses, myths and ideology. He finds that ‘Dallas is an invention, an imagined environment, mythologized and promoted in singular images’ (p. 47). A key myth, according to Graff, was that Dallas had no reason to exist except for its strong leadership. Along with this myth was the celebration of ‘the Dallas Way’, shorthand for the way Dallas leaders dominated decision-making and took risks to promote the city's growth. Celebrating business leadership as the key to the city's success not only discouraged opposition but inhibited efforts to write more complex and meaningful histories of the city. Indeed, Graff is dismissive of most recent historical accounts of Dallas, finding them overly influenced by the Dallas myth, simplistic in their approach, and not inclusive enough of the city's social history. Graff calls for more inclusive histories of the city, emphasizing the struggles of minorities and working-class peoples while underscoring the costs of leading the city in ‘the Dallas Way’.

The second part of the book focuses on the consequences of running the city as a growth machine and examines the impact of the oligarchic-type leadership who dominated Dallas. Their control was aided, according to Graff, by their use of myth and by citizens’ ignorance of the city's past. The author questions the effectiveness of those civic leaders through chapters on contemporary Dallas emphasizing its racial divide, its mimetic and monumental development, as well as its recent governance controversies.

Although clearly underscoring how ‘the Dallas Way’ has helped create a variety of problems in present-day Dallas, this book sometimes mimics what it criticizes – a simplistic, ahistorical approach to the city. Too often the book treats Dallas as an exception and fails to link it to the scholarship of numerous Southwestern cities that show similar characteristics. Graff's nostalgia for the old industrial city of his youth may also blind him to the new urban landscape that reflects different cultural, economic and political values. Indeed, the author embraces a type of historical continuity that refuses to acknowledge different modes of thinking and action during different historical periods. Such flaws should not distract from some of the book's messages including the importance of history, the shortcomings of single-focused leadership and the costs of inadequate attention to social problems. But readers interested in a more coherently structured history of Dallas might want to look elsewhere.