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Lines in the Sand: Congressional Redistricting in Texas and the Downfall of Tom DeLay by Steve Bickerstaff
The events of 2003 in Texas were important to the political history of this country. Congressman Tom DeLay led a Republican effort to gerrymander the state's thirty-two congressional districts to defeat all ten of the Anglo Democratic incumbents and to elect more Republicans; Democratic state lawmakers fled the state in an effort to defeat the plan. The Lone Star State uproar attracted attention worldwide. The Republicans won this showdown, gaining six additional seats from Texas and protecting the one endangered Republican incumbent. This outcome has undeniably affected national policy-making and has made it more difficult for Democrats to regain a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives. Some of the methods used by DeLay to achieve this result, however, led to his criminal indictment and ultimately to his downfall.
With its eye-opening research, readable style, and insightful commentary, Lines in the Sand provides a front-line account of what happened in 2003, often through the personal stories of members of both parties and of the minority activist groups caught in a political vortex. Law professor Steve Bickerstaff provides much-needed historical perspective and also probes the aftermath of the 2003 redistricting, including the criminal prosecutions of DeLay and his associates and the events that led to DeLay's eventual resignation from the U.S. House of Representatives.
How Perfect is That by Sarah Bird
Blythe Young—a wannabe Texas princess, a heroine as plucky, driven, and desperate as "Vanity Fair"'s Becky Sharp—is plummeting precipitously from up- to down-stairs, banging her head on every step of the Austin social ladder as she falls. Not unlike the country as a whole, Blythe has surrendered to a multitude of dubious moral choices and is now facing the disastrous consequences: bankruptcy, public humiliation, a teensy fondness for the pharmaceuticals, and no Pap smear for ten years. But worst of all, she is forced to move back into the fleabag co-op boardinghouse where she lived when she was a student at the University of Texas.
Though Blythe cares much more about the ravaged state of her nails, and how to get the ingredients for Code Warrior—Blythe's proprietary blend of Stoli, Ativan, and Red Bull that keeps everything in focus—her soul is hanging in the balance. Only when she is in danger of losing the one friend who's been her true moral center is she ready to face her sins and make amends. And her penance is merciless: she must find a way to lure her former socialite friends into the tofu tenement she has been reduced to. Little does Blythe know that the ensuing collision between the pierced, tattooed, and dreadlocked inhabitants and the pampered, Kir-sipping socialites offers the only hope of finding a way out of her moral quagmire.
Funny, fast-paced, sharp-eyed, an old-fashioned morality tale with an appropriately twenty-first-century ending, How Perfect Is That is a comic triumph of a novel.
Flamenco Academy: A Novel by Sarah Bird
A superbly alive novel about two young American women caught up in the fevered excitement of the flamenco revival sweeping the Southwest.
The place is Albuquerque. Cyndi Rae Hrncir, called Rae, seventeen and shy, is twice spellbound, first by high school bad girl Didi ("Dirty Deeds") Steinberg, already embarked on a search for stardom, then by a devastatingly handsome young flamenco guitarist, Tomas Montenegro. Soon the girls are in college, where they abandon themselves to the disciplines and demands of the university's flamenco academy and to the hypnotic storytelling of their teacher, Dona Carlota, Tomas's great-aunt. She initiates them into the traditions, the rhythms, and the steps of "flamenco puro," with its central imperative: "Dame la verdad"—“Give me the truth.”
Locked in a volatile triangle and driven by obsession—Didi's with stardom, Rae's with Tomas, Tomas's with his mysterious heritage—these three emerge as the brightest stars on the New World flamenco scene, while secrets and desires, longings and betrayals pulse just beneath the glittering surface of their compelling performances.
A sense of passion and danger has always surrounded flamenco. In The Flamenco Academy, Sarah Bird delivers a novel with a sense of history and character that matches the drama of the dance it so brilliantly celebrates.
Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt by H. W. Brands
A sweeping, magisterial biography of the man generally considered the greatest president of the twentieth century, admired by Democrats and Republicans alike. Traitor to His Class sheds new light on FDR's formative years, his remarkable willingness to champion the concerns of the poor and disenfranchised, his combination of political genius, firm leadership, and matchless diplomacy in saving democracy in America during the Great Depression and the American cause of freedom in World War II.
Drawing on archival materials, public speeches, personal correspondence, and accounts by family and close associates, acclaimed bestselling historian and biographer H. W. Brands offers a compelling and intimate portrait of Roosevelt's life and career. Brands explores the powerful influence of FDR's dominating mother and the often tense and always unusual partnership between FDR and his wife, Eleanor, and her indispensable contributions to his presidency. Most of all, the book traces in breathtaking detail FDR's revolutionary efforts with his New Deal legislation to transform the American political economy in order to save it, his forceful—and cagey—leadership before and during World War II, and his lasting legacy in creating the foundations of the postwar international order.
Traitor to His Class brilliantly captures the qualities that have made FDR a beloved figure to millions of Americans.
The Night Journal by Elizabeth Crook
A mesmerizing novel of four generations of Southwestern women bound to a mythical legacy. With its family secrets and hallowed texts containing explosive truths, "The Night Journal" suggests A. S. Byatta’s Possession transplanted to the raw and beautiful landscape of the American Southwest. Meg Mabry has spent her life oppressed by her family’s legacy, a heritage beginning with the journals written by her great-grandmother in the 1890s and solidified by her grandmother, Bassie, a famous historian who published them to great acclaim. Until now, Meg has stubbornly refused to read the journals. But when she concedes to accompany the elderly and viper-tongued Bassie on a return trip to the fabled land of her childhood in New Mexico, Meg finally succumbs to the allure of her great-grandmother’s story, and soon everything she believed about her family is turned upside down.
The Predator State by James Galbraith
The cult of the free market has dominated economic policy-talk since the Reagan revolution of nearly thirty years ago. But a funny thing happened on the bridge to the twenty-first century. While liberals continue to bow before the free-market altar, conservatives in the style of George W. Bush have abandoned it altogether. That is why principled conservatives—the Reagan true believers—long ago abandoned Bush.
Enter James Galbraith, the iconoclastic economist. In this riveting book, Galbraith first dissects the stale remains of Reaganism and shows how Bush and company had no choice except to dump them into the trash. He then explores the true nature of the Bush regime: a "corporate republic;" a coalition of lobbies, doing the bidding of clients; and a predator state, intent not on reducing government but rather on diverting public cash into private hands.
Galbraith follows with an impertinent question: if conservatives no longer take free markets seriously, why should liberals? Why not build a new economic policy based on what is really happening in this country?
A timely, provocative work whose message will endure beyond this election season, The Predator State will appeal to the broad audience of thoughtful Americans who wish to understand the forces at work in our economy and culture and who seek to live in a nation that is both prosperous and progressive.
Looking for the Horse Latitudes by Miguel Gonzalez Gerth
Looking for the Horse Latitudes is a stunning poetry collection from esteemed poet and translator Miguel Gonzalez-Gerth. Describing this bilingual volume as a laboratory in which a very interesting experiment has been carried out, Gonzalez-Gerth writes in both Spanish and English and moves deftly between the two languages, creating a voice both cosmopolitan and intensely Latin American. These poems offer the reader a world of oceanic beauty, an enchanting seascape of mermaids and shipwrecks, sirens and seabirds. Playful and profound in turns, Looking for the Horse Latitudes is a welcome contribution to this outstanding poet’s body of work and an important addition to any poetry collection.
Passionate Nation: Epic History of Texas by James Haley
Texas has become the most American of all the states. Texas's politics has taken over in Washington, and Texas's passionate sense of itself as a nation is echoed by the fervent patriotism of tens of millions of Americans. Texas is also our most outsized hodgepodge—of Latino, black, white, Asian; of characters who transcend any category. In so many ways, America today is Texas writ large.
In Passionate Nation James Haley offers a comprehensive and definitive history of this singular and singularly American state, a history that explains how Texas became Texas, even before it became such a central national symbol for America. Haley peers through the lens of the extraordinary "ordinary" men and women who have streamed to Texas from its beginnings, and created it in their own contradictory, uncontrollable image.
He recovers elements bowdlerized by previous and more prudish generations, such as the discovery, by sixteenth-century explorer Cabeza de Vaca, of Indian warriors living in conjugal relationships with male eunuchs. He presents documents never before published, such as a rare appeal for aid from the town of Gonzales on the eve of the Texas Revolution. He restores to the history important figures who have been allowed to drop from the usual recitation, such as Benjamin Lundy, who almost single-handedly prevented the Texas Republic from being annexed to the United States for nearly a decade. He corrects the record at every turn, starting with the fact that Jane Lundy was not the "mother of Texas." Throughout, he uses great stories to present the passion of people who lived and worried and suffered and laughed.
The first Indians settled in Texas in about 10,000 B.C.; the first Europeans arrived in the early sixteenth century. Since then, the land that is now Texas has belonged to six powers at eight different times: Spain (1519-1685), France (to 1690), Spain again (to 1821), Mexico (to 1836), the Republic of Texas (to 1845), the U.S.A. (to 1861), the Confederacy (to 1865), and the U.S.A. to stay. From Jim Bowie's and Davy Crockett's myth-enshrouded stand at the Alamo to the Mexican-American War to Sam Houston's heroic failed effort to keep Texas in the Union during the Civil War, the transitions in Texas history have often been as painful and tense as the "normal" periods in between. Here, in all of its epic grandeur, is the story of Texas as its own passionate nation, a history that shows that circumstances can radically change, yet culture and character can last for centuries.
Challenger Park: A Novel by Stephen Harrigan
A novel of extraordinary power about what it's like, and what it means, to journey into space as one of today's astronauts.
At the novel's center: Lucy Kincheloe, an astronaut married to an astronaut, the loving mother of two young children, with a fierce ambition to excel in the space program. Her husband, Brian, a rigorous man whose dreams of glory have been blighted by two star-crossed missions. Walt Womack, the steady, unflappable leader of the training team that prepares Lucy for her first shuttle flight.
Lucy has devoted years of intense and focused effort to win her place on a mission, but as her lifelong dream of flying in space comes true, her familiar world appears to be falling apart around her. Her marriage is deteriorating. Her son's asthma is growing more serious. Her relationship with Walt Womack is becoming dangerously intimate. And when at last she is in space, 240 miles above the earth, and an accident renders the world she left behind appallingly distant—perhaps unreachable—her spirit is tested in gripping and unexpected ways.
In The Gates of the Alamo, Stephen Harrigan's narrative authority brought a vanished nineteenth-century Texas to vibrant life. In Challenger Park, he does the same with the world of space flight, bringing us up close to the lives—the risks, the friendships, the rituals, the training—of the astronauts and the people who work with them. Harrigan has written an exciting—indeed a thrilling—novel about the contrary pulls of home and adventure, reality and dreams, and the unimaginable experience, the joys and terrors and revelations, of space flight itself.
The Gates of the Alamo by Stephen Harrigan
A huge, riveting, deeply imagined novel about the siege and fall of the Alamo, an event that formed the consciousness of Texas and that resonates through American history.
The time is 1835. At the center of a canvas crowded with Mexicans and Americans, with Karankawa and Comanche Indians, with settlers of many nationalities, stand three people whose fortunes quickly become our urgent concern: Edmund McGowan, a naturalist of towering courage and intellect, whose life's work is threatened by the war against Mexico and whose character is tested by his own dangerous pride; Mary Mott, a widowed innkeeper on the Texas coast, a determined and resourceful woman; and her sixteen-year-old son, Terrell, whose first shattering experience with love leads him instead to war, and into the crucible of the Alamo.
Never before has the fall of the Alamo been portrayed with such immediacy. And for the first time the story is told not just from the perspective of the American defenders but from that of the Mexican attackers as well. We follow Blas Montoya, a sergeant in an elite sharpshooter company, as he fights to keep his men alive not only in the inferno of battle but also during the long forced march north from Mexico proper to Texas. And through the eyes of the ambitious mapmaker Telesforo Villasenor, we witness the cold deliberations of General Santa Anna.
Filled with dramatic scenes, abounding in fictional and historical personalities—among them James Bowie, David Crockett, and William Travis—The Gates of the Alamo enfolds us in history, and through its remarkable and passionate storytelling allows us to participate at last in an American legend.
The History of Texas Music by Gary Hartman
The richly diverse ethnic heritage of the Lone Star State has brought to the Southwest a remarkable array of rhythms, instruments, and musical styles that have blended here in unique ways and, in turn, have helped shape the music of the nation and the world.
Historian Gary Hartman writes knowingly and lovingly of the Lone Star State's musical traditions. In the first thorough survey of the vast and complex cultural mosaic that has produced what we know today as "Texas music," he paints a broad, panoramic view, offers analysis of the origins of and influences on specific genres, profiles key musicians, and provides guidance to additional sources for further information.
A musician himself, Hartman draws on both academic and non-academic sources to give a more complete understanding of the state's remarkable musical heritage. He combines scholarly training in music history and ethnic community studies with first-hand knowledge of how important music is as a cultural medium through which human beings communicate information, ideas, emotions, values, and beliefs and bond together as friends, families, and communities.
The History of Texas Music incorporates a selection of well-chosen photographs of both prominent and less well-known artists and describes not only the ethnic origins of much of Texas music but also the cross-pollination among various genres. Today, the music of Texas—which includes Native American music, gospel, blues, ragtime, swing, jazz, rhythm and blues, conjunto, Tejano, cajun, zydeco, western swing, honky tonk, polkas, schottisches, rock & roll, rap, hip hop, and more—reflects the unique cultural dynamics of the Southwest.
We Happy Few by Rolando Hinojosa-Smith
In the tragicomic novel, We Happy Few, internationally recognized author Rolando Hinojosa takes us inside the politics of a tumultuous university campus set in a quiet university town on the Texas-Mexico border. The chaotic politics of faculty promotions and tenure, the zany protests of a student group representing the majority Mexican-American ethnic group on campus, and the complex work of a search committee to replace a high-level university administrator unfold at Belken State University in Klail City, Texas. From the offices of deans and professors to those of familiar power brokers such as banker Arnold "Noddy" Perkins and police chief Rafe Buenrostro, and even to the State House in Austin, Hinojosa sets up a beguiling game of life—and death. Racism and political machinations raise the stakes in the battle for the future of the university, the outcome of which will decide the fate of the faculty, staff, and especially the students, who place their hope for advancement in education. With We Happy Few, Hinojosa once again invites readers to observe the goings-on in his quixotic literary landscape, which The New York Times compared to Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Macondo and William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha.
The Texas Book: Profiles, History, and Reminiscenes of the University by Richard Holland
As the University of Texas at Austin celebrates its 125th anniversary, it can justly claim to be a "university of the first class," as mandated in the Texas Constitution. The university's faculty and student body include winners of the Nobel Prize, the Pulitzer Prize, the MacArthur "genius award," and Rhodes and Marshall Scholarships, as well as members of learned societies all over the world. UT's athletic programs are said to be the best overall in the United States, and its libraries, museums, and archives are lauded in every educated part of the world. Texas alumni have made their marks in law, engineering, geology, business, journalism, and all fields of the sciences, arts, and entertainment.
The Texas Book gathers together personality profiles, historical essays, and first-person reminiscences to create an informal, highly readable history of UT. Many fascinating characters appear in these pages, including visionary president and Ransom Center founder Harry Huntt Ransom, contrarian English professor and Texas folklorist J. Frank Dobie, legendary regent and lightning rod Frank C. Erwin, and founder of the field of Mexican-American Studies, Américo Paredes. The historical pieces recall some of the most dramatic and challenging episodes in the university's history, including recurring attacks on the school by politicians and regents, the institution's history of segregation and struggles to become a truly diverse university, the sixties' protest movements, and the Tower sniper shooting. Rounding off the collection are reminiscences by former and current students and faculty, including Walter Prescott Webb, Willie Morris, Betty Sue Flowers, J. M. Coetzee, and Barbara Jordan, who capture the spirit of the campus at moments in time that defined their eras.
Saving Savannah: The City and the Civil War by Jaqueline Jones
A panoramic portrait of the city of Savannah before, during, and after the Civil War, a poignant story of the African-American freedom struggle in this prosperous southern riverport, set against a backdrop of military conflict and political turmoil. Jacqueline Jones, prizewinning author of the groundbreaking Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow, has written a masterpiece of time and place, transporting readers to the boisterous streets of this fascinating city.
Drawing on military records, diaries, letters, newspapers, and memoirs, Jones brings Savannah to life in all its diversity, weaving together the stories of individual men and women, bankers and dockworkers, planters and field hands, enslaved laborers and free people of color. The book captures in vivid detail the determination of former slaves to integrate themselves into the nation's body politic and to control their own families, workplaces, churches, and schools. She explains how white elites, forestalling democracy and equality, created novel political and economic strategies to maintain their stranglehold on the machinery of power, and often found unexpected allies in northern missionaries and military officials.
Jones brilliantly describes life in the Georgia lowcountry—what it was like to be a slave toiling in the disease-ridden rice swamps; the strivings of black entrepreneurs, slaves and free blacks alike; and the bizarre intricacies of the slave-master relationship. Here are the stories of Thomas Simms, an enslaved brick mason who escapes to Boston only to be captured by white authorities; Charles Jones Jr., the scion of a prominent planter family, who remains convinced that Savannah is invincible even as the city's defenses fall one after the other in the winter of 1861; his mother, Mary Jones, whose journal records her horror as the only world she knows vanishes before her; Nancy Johnson, an enslaved woman who loses her family's stores of food and precious household belongings to rampaging Union troops; Aaron A. Bradley, a fugitive slave turned attorney and provocateur who defies whites in the courtroom, on the streets, and in the rice fields; and the Reverend Tunis G. Campbell, who travels from the North to establish self-sufficient black colonies on the Georgia coast.
Deeply researched and beautifully written, Saving Savannah is a powerful account of slavery's long reach and the way the war transformed this southern city forever.
The Hounds of Winter by James Magnuson
This psychological thriller by the award-winning novelist James Magnuson combines the moral acuity of Graham Greene with the twists and turns of the best Hitchcock films.
David Neisen came seeking reconciliation; what he found was a father's worst nightmare. Arriving on Christmas Eve to spend the holidays with his daughter Maya, he discovers her murdered on the floor of their cabin in the Wisconsin woods. He sees a ski-masked figure lurching through the snowdrifts behind the house and sets out in pursuit—only to transform himself into the prime suspect in his daughter's death.
Struggling to elude his pursuers in the fierce Wisconsin winter, Neisen must deal first with the ghosts of his past—a childhood tragedy that binds him to the small-town sheriff, the friends of his youth who must now choose to shelter or betray him, and the unresolved mysteries about the munitions plant where his father worked during the Korean War. And looming above it all is his growing certainty that his daughter was not who he thought she was. The answers lie hidden in "this Midwestern world of farmers and sons and daughters of farmers with their Christian forbearance and Scandinavian silences, their delicate kindnesses, this Cold War world, this white-bread world. It receded like the Ice Age had receded, leaving behind its own rubble, its broken citadels and buried secrets...”
Bob Bullock: God Bless Texas by Dave McNeely
Renowned for his fierce devotion to the people of Texas—as well as his equally fierce rages and unpredictable temper—Bob Bullock was the most powerful political figure in Texas at the end of the twentieth century. First elected to the Texas House of Representatives in 1956, Bullock held several key statewide posts before capturing the lieutenant governor's office in 1990. Though nominally the state's number two official, Bullock in fact became Texas's top power broker, wielding tremendous influence over the legislative agenda and state budget through the 1990s while also mentoring and supporting a future president—George W. Bush.
In this lively, yet thoroughly researched biography, award-winning journalists Dave McNeely and Jim Henderson craft a well-rounded portrait of Bob Bullock, underscoring both his political adroitness and his personal demons. They trace Bullock's rise through state government as Assistant Attorney General, Secretary of State, State Comptroller, and Lieutenant Governor, showing how he increased the power of every office he held. The authors spotlight Bullock's substantial achievements, which included hiring an unprecedented number of women and minorities, instituting a performance review to increase the efficiency of state agencies, restructuring the public school funding system, and creating the state's first water conservation and management plan.
Daisy and the Doll by Angela Shelf Medearis
Boldness and a gift for improvising verse enable eight-year-old African American Daisy Turner to triumph over an incident of discrimination in her nineteenth-century rural Vermont school. Told in Daisy's voice, the book's themes of identity and self-affirmation offer a powerful lesson to today's youngsters who face similar situations of prejudice and stereotyping in twenty-first-century classrooms. Suggestions on the concluding page provide creative ways for young readers to develop their own storytelling style in verse. Ages 6-10.
The Kitchen Diva by Angela Shelf Medearis
The Kitchen Diva compiles recipes from Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas collected from slave quarters, plantations, church suppers, family reunions, ancient celebrations, and modern ethnic kitchens. It also includes numerous vegetarian dishes, calls for organic ingredients, and offers information and recipes that address ways to combat diet-related illnesses from diabetes to heart disease.
Waterloo: A Novel by Karen Olsson
Nick Lasseter is in a slump—as a reporter for the Waterloo Weekly, and in every other part of his life as well. When he grudgingly agrees to write a piece about a rising female Republican legislator, he stumbles onto a political fight in which the good guys and bad guys start to seem interchangeable. And not even the deceased can be relied upon to stick to their stories when Nick gets involved with a political insider. As they search the dim depths of a civic past that's anything but dead and buried, they find that some things never change—things like the moral ambiguity of practical politics and the sad, hilarious cluelessness of young men in love.
Bittersweet and biting, elegiac and sharply observed, Waterloo is a portrait of a generation in search of itself—and a love letter to the slackers, rockers, hustlers, hacks, and hangers-on who populate Austin, Texas—from a formidable new intelligence in American fiction.
Willie Nelson: An Epic Life by Joe Nick Patoski
From his first performance at age four, Willie Nelson was driven to make music and live life on his own terms. But though he is a songwriter of exceptional depth—"Crazy" was one of his early classics—Willie only found success after abandoning Nashville and moving to Austin, Texas.
Red Headed Stranger made country cool to a new generation of fans. Wanted: The Outlaws became the first country album to sell a million copies. And "On the Road Again" became the anthem for Americans on the move. A craggy-faced, pot-smoking philosopher, Willie Nelson is one of America's great iconoclasts and idols.
Now Joe Nick Patoski draws on over 100 interviews with Willie and his family, band, and friends to tell Nelson's story, from humble Depression-era roots, to his musical education in Texas honky-tonks and his flirtations with whiskey, women, and weed; from his triumph with #1 hit "Always On My Mind" to his nearly career-ending battles with debt and the IRS; and his ultimate redemption and ascension to American hero.
Barbara Jordan: Speaking the Truth with Eloquent Thunder by Max Sherman
Revered by Americans across the political spectrum, Barbara Jordan was "the most outspoken moral voice of the American political system," in the words of former President Bill Clinton, who awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1994. Throughout her career as a Texas senator, U.S. congresswoman, and distinguished professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, Barbara Jordan lived by a simple creed: "Ethical behavior means being honest, telling the truth, and doing what you said you were going to do." Her strong stand for ethics in government, civil liberties, and democratic values still provides a standard around which the nation can unite in the twenty-first century.
This volume brings together several major political speeches that articulate Barbara Jordan's most deeply held values. They include: "Erosion of Civil Liberties," a commencement address delivered at Howard University on May 12, 1974, in which Jordan warned that "tyranny in America is possible"; "The Constitutional Basis for Impeachment," Jordan's ringing defense of the U.S. Constitution before the House Judiciary Committee investigating the Watergate break-in; keynote addresses to the Democratic National Conventions of 1976 and 1992, in which Jordan set forth her vision of the Democratic Party as an advocate for the common good and a catalyst of change; testimony in the U.S. Congress on the confirmation of Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork and on immigration reform; meditations on faith and politics from two National Prayer Breakfasts; the acceptance speech for the 1995 Sylvanus Thayer Award presented by the Association of Graduates of the United States Military Academy, in which Jordan challenged the military to uphold the values of "duty, honor, country."
Accompanying the speeches, some of which readers can also watch on an enclosed DVD, are context-setting introductions by volume editor Max Sherman. The book concludes with the eloquent eulogy that Bill Moyers delivered at Barbara Jordan's memorial service in 1996, in which he summed up Jordan's remarkable life and career by saying, "Just when we despaired of finding a hero, she showed up, to give the sign of democracy.... This is no small thing. This, my friends, this is grace. And for it we are thankful."
Coach Royal: Conversations with a Texas Football Legend by John Wheat
Many legendary men have been associated with University of Texas football, but for most fans one man will always be "Coach"—Darrell K Royal. One of the most successful coaches in college football, Royal led the Longhorns to three national championships and eleven Southwest Conference titles during his twenty years (1956-1976) as UT's head coach. He coached some of the Horns' best players, including future Heisman Trophy winner Earl Campbell, and was named NCAA Coach of the Year three times. In 1969, an ABC-TV poll of sportswriters called Royal the Coach of the Decade. In 1996 UT recognized his unrivalled contribution to Longhorn football when it designated Memorial Stadium the Darrell K Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium in his honor.
Now, for the first time, Darrell Royal tells his life story in his own words. He remembers growing up poor in Hollis, Oklahoma, during the Great Depression, and describes playing college football for the University of Oklahoma and then coaching a succession of college teams and one pro team before settling in at UT for the rest of his career. He gives a fascinating, behind-the-scenes look at Longhorn football during his time—recruiting strategies, coaching techniques, the famous wishbone offense, unforgettable wins and losses, and his impressions of rival teams and coaches, including Bear Bryant of Texas A& M and Alabama and Frank Broyles of Arkansas.
Proving that he's still the same straight shooter as always, Darrell Royal even discusses some of the controversies he's dealt with, including early charges of racism in the UT football program, the impact of Title IX on college athletics, his association with Jim Bob Moffett and the Freeport-MacMoRan Corporation, his longtime friendship with Willie Nelson, and his decision to retire from coaching. But whether he's describing the tough times he's faced professionally and personally or the rewards of being UT's most beloved coach and goodwill ambassador, Royal maintains the same plainspoken honesty and sense of honor that—as much as the winning seasons—have made him a legend to so many people.
A Book of Photographs from Lonesome Dove by Bill Wittliff
Lonesome Dove—Larry McMurtry's epic tale of two aging Texas Rangers who drive a herd of stolen cattle 2,500 miles from the Rio Grande to Montana to found the first ranch there—captured the public imagination and has never let it go. The novel, published in 1985, was a New York Times best seller and won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. More than two decades after publication, it still sells tens of thousands of copies every year.
The Lonesome Dove miniseries, which first aired on CBS in 1989, lassoed an even wider audience. Twenty-six million households watched the premier episode, and countless millions more have ridden with Gus and Call each time the movie has rerun on TV, video, and DVD. In addition to its popular success, the miniseries has also garnered unanimous critical acclaim. It was nominated for eighteen Emmy Awards and won seven. It also won Golden Globe Awards for Best Television Miniseries and Best Actor; a Peabody Award; the D. W. Griffith Award for Best Television Series; the National Association of Television Critics Award for Program of the Year and Outstanding Achievement in Drama; and the Writers' Guild of America Award for Best Teleplay (Bill Wittliff).
Now bringing the sweeping visual imagery of the miniseries to the printed page, A Book of Photographs from Lonesome Dove presents more than one hundred classic images created by Bill Wittliff, the award-winning writer and executive producer (with Suzanne de Passe) of Lonesome Dove and a renowned fine art photographer. Wittliff took these photographs during the filming of the miniseries, but they are worlds apart from ordinary production stills. Reminiscent of the nineteenth-century cowboy photographs of Erwin Smith and the western paintings of Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell, each Lonesome Dove image stands alone as an evocative work of art, while as a whole, they provide a stunning visual summary of the entire miniseries.
Accompanying the photographs are a foreword by Lonesome Dove author Larry McMurtry and an introduction by Stephen Harrigan, who describes the epic-in-itself creative journey that led to the making of the Lonesome Dove novel, miniseries, and book of photographs. In the afterword, Bill Wittliff recalls unforgettable moments—some hilarious, others momentous—from the production of the miniseries. A roster of the cast and crew completes the text.
As its enduring popularity proves, Lonesome Dove conveys the spirit of the American West and the freedom of the open plains and sky as few other creative works ever have. For everyone who loves the novel and the movie, A Book of Photographs from Lonesome Dove provides yet another powerful way of experiencing this mythical, yet wholly real, world.
La Vida Brinca by Bill Wittliff
La vida brinca—life jumps—and yet we strive to capture its passing moments by creating images. One of the simplest yet most evocative techniques for image-making is pinhole photography. Using a tiny aperture without a lens to shine light on a piece of film, pinhole cameras accumulate light until an image forms. Bill Wittliff calls the cameras he makes tragaluces, "light swallowers." By controlling only the size of the aperture, the distance to the film, and the length of the exposure, he makes images that forsake the documentary realism of traditional photography to disclose instead the presence of the mystical in the everyday world.
The tragaluz photographs in La Vida Brinca record iconic images of Hispanic life. Wittliff photographed fiestas, religious observances, street scenes, people's faces, and enduring rural landscapes. But with the soft focus and surprise elements that typify his tragaluz photographs, these images become dreamlike—scenes from a world where, as Stephen Harrigan says, "reassuring touchstones are likely to dissolve, and where the unseen is always startlingly on view." The accompanying essays by Harrigan and Elizabeth Ferrer discuss the history and techniques of pinhole photography, as well as Bill Wittliff's artistic choice to work in this medium. As a work of art, La Vida Brinca reveals that pinhole photography is an ideal vehicle for finding profound meaning in the commonplace, for seeing beyond what the eye can see.
The Necessity of Theater: The Art of Watching and Being Watched by Paul Woodruff
What is unique and essential about theater? What separates it from other arts? Do we need "theater" in some fundamental way? The art of theater, as Paul Woodruff says in this elegant and unique book, is as necessary—and as powerful—as language itself. Defining theater broadly, including sporting events and social rituals, he treats traditional theater as only one possibility in an art that—at its most powerful—can change lives and (as some peoples believe) bring a divine presence to earth.
The Necessity of Theater analyzes the unique power of theater by separating it into the twin arts of watching and being watched, practiced together in harmony by watchers and the watched. Whereas performers practice the art of being watched—making their actions worth watching, and paying attention to action, choice, plot, character, mimesis, and the sacredness of performance space—audiences practice the art of watching: paying close attention. A good audience is emotionally engaged as spectators; their engagement takes a form of empathy that can lead to a special kind of human wisdom. As Plato implied, theater cannot teach us transcendent truths, but it can teach us about ourselves.
Characteristically thoughtful, probing, and original, Paul Woodruff makes the case for theater as a unique form of expression connected to our most human instincts. The Necessity of Theater should appeal to anyone seriously interested or involved in theater or performance more broadly.
From the mountain villages of Nepal to his hometown of Abilene, Texas, Bill Wright has traveled the world to learn about and photograph other people's lives. The directness and intimacy of his images bear witness to the remarkable rapport that he has achieved with people in many walks of life, from a woodcarver in Tanzania to Aboriginal children in Australia. In fact, as Sam Abell observes, Wright's work is reminiscent of The Family of Man, the most influential photography book ever published. People's Lives records a photographic journey in celebration of the human spirit. In sixty-nine duotone images taken around the world, Bill Wright captures what is best in people - our joy, love, hope, and resilience. Many of the photographs are accompanied by extended captions in which Wright describes the encounters that produced them. In the preface, he also discusses his photographic career, artistic philosophy, and methods of working. Sam Abell of National Geographic Magazine offers a perceptive assessment and appreciation of Wright's work in the introduction. Bill Wright is an award-winning photographer and writer, whose work has appeared in numerous exhibitions and books.
The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright
A gripping narrative that spans five decades, The Looming Tower explains in unprecedented detail the growth of Islamic fundamentalism, the rise of al-Qaeda, and the intelligence failures that culminated in the attacks on the World Trade Center. Lawrence Wright re-creates firsthand the transformation of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri from incompetent and idealistic soldiers in Afghanistan to leaders of the most successful terrorist group in history. He follows FBI counterterrorism chief John O’Neill as he uncovers the emerging danger from al-Qaeda in the 1990s and struggles to track this new threat. Packed with new information and a deep historical perspective, The Looming Tower is the definitive history of the long road to September 11.