Contributing Editor
TEXAS SPORTS HISTORY
Michael Hurd
Thursday Night Lights: The Story of Black High School Football in Texas
University of Texas Press
Hardcover, 978-1-4773-1034-2, 260 pages plus 49 b/w photos, appendixes, index; $24.95
October 2017
Reviewed by Chris Manno
Michael Hurd’s Thursday Night Lights is an important story wrapped up in a problematic book. In Texas, “Friday Night Lights” refers to the tradition of high school football on Friday nights, white student leagues only, not the black leagues that played on Thursday nights. Hurd does a commendable job crafting a historical narrative that reflects careful research and documentation — much of which appears in the appendices which, along with the introduction, make up a whopping 30% of what is already a fairly brief text, considering the years covered. That leaves the reader to wonder if the add-ons are redundant or recursive, a question that zeroes in on the primary flaw of Thursday Night Lights: either the factual information or the narrative itself is unsettled to the extent that readers need more substantiation than Hurd offers.
Still, I was captivated by the specifics of leaders and selfless players that populate the historical thread, men like Charles Brown and his wife Carolyn who not only fed his teams and laundered their uniforms in their own home, but also led team after team to championships with Coach Brown learning the job as he went. >>READ MORE
FICTION/MYSTERY
William D. Darling
Anahuac: A Texas Story
Canned Peas Productions
Paperback, 978-19746-4540-4 (also available as ebook), 278 pages, $14.99
October 2, 2017
Austin writer William D. Darling’s second novel, Anahuac, is an entertaining, engrossing legal thriller that offers both darkly humorous and good-natured thrusts at life, love, and law in early 1970s Texas. Some brief bits of Gulf Coast Texana also help set the scenes.
A young lawyer takes on a case that snowballs into a death-penalty murder trial in Chambers County, just after he has gone into private law practice in La Porte with his barely reliable best friend and the best friend’s stunning wife. >>READ MORE
Texas ReadsGlenn Dromgoole
>> archive
Story collection offers a treat for Elmer Kelton fans
Fans of the late Elmer Kelton are in for a treat.
Wild West, a new collection of eleven of Kelton’s earliest short stories from the 1950s, has been published by Forge Books (366 pages, $27.99 hardcover). The stories, which gave the author his start as a fiction writer, originally appeared in some of the western “pulp fiction” magazines like Ranch Romances, Six-Gun Western, and Triple Western.
“I was fortunate to come along a few years before the end of the pulp-magazine era,” Kelton wrote in his autobiography, Sandhills Boy. “They were good training for beginning writers as well as bread and butter for many prolific professionals.”
The pulps began dying off in the late 1950s as TV replaced short stories as a source of entertainment. Kelton turned to writing novels and eventually wrote more than forty of them, while also working full-time as an agricultural journalist in San Angelo for forty-two years.
The stories in Wild West — ranging from eleven pages to more than fifty pages — have never been collected in one volume. Kelton, winner of seven Spur Awards, died in 2009 at age 83. In 1995 his fellow western authors voted him the best western writer of all time.
Mavericks fans: Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban writes the foreword to Tim Cato’s book 100 Things Maverick Fans Should Know & Do Before They Die (Triumph Books, $14.95 paperback).
Listed Number 1 is “Dirk Nowitzki Means Everything,” and Cuban certainly agrees, calling Nowitzki “the best player on the court and the coolest person off of it that I’ve ever seen.”
Number 2 on Cato’s list is “2011 Was Different,” the year Dallas won the NBA championship.
Number 3 is “Mark Cuban” and Number 100 is “An Oral History of the 24 Hours After the 2011 Finals.”
In between, Cato covers a lot of games and names, including Steve Nash, Rolando Blackman, Don Nelson, Rick Carlisle, Jason Kidd, Roy Tarpley, and the 20 three-pointers made in the 2011 “Mother’s Day Massacre” playoff win over the Lakers, 122–86.
It’s not just the good years that get ink in the book. Number 85 is “The 11-Win Season,” when Dallas almost set a record for ineptitude in 1993, losing seventy-one games while winning just eleven. Cato rehashes all eleven wins that year.
Glenn Dromgoole’s latest book is West Texas StoriesContact him at g.dromgoole@suddenlink.net.
>> Check out his previous Texas Reads columns in Lone Star Literary Life
Friends of the Amarillo Public Library put the ”fun” in fund-raising with 7th annual Books to Broadway evening
AMARILLO — Kids’ Lit on Broadway was the theme of a bookish evening of entertainment Nov. 2 benefiting the Amarillo Public Library. In addition to a silent auction featuring ingeniously paired books and gifts, and free desserts, audiences were treated to a revue of musical selections performed by WTAMU singers Candace Carpenter, Peyton Kane, and Jayson Sanderson (ensemble member Christopher Meerdink had to bow out due to illness) and accompanist Jan Waller under the direction of Robert Hanson, director of music at West Texas A&M University.
The delightful program included songs from from children’s books that became Broadway musicals such as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The Secret Garden, You’re a Good Man Charlie Brown, The Lion King, Seussical: The Musical, Finding Neverland, and Oliver. The audience was invited t sing along during perennial favorite “Tomorrow” from Annie, the musical inspired by the Little Orphan Annie comics. Library director Stacy Yates emceed the event. >>READ MORE
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