MUSIC BIOGRAPHY

Roy Orbison Jr., Wesley Orbison, and Alex Orbison, with Jeff Slate

The Authorized Roy Orbison

Center Street

Hardcover, 978-1-4789-7655-4 (ebook and audio versions also available), 264 pages, $15.99

October 2017

Reviewed by Si Dunn

Texas native Roy Orbison remains a major name in popular music nearly thirty years after his untimely death at age 52 in 1988. His hit songs such as “Only the Lonely,” “Running Scared,” “Blue Bayou,” and “Oh, Pretty Woman” and his distinctive, wide-ranging voice continue to be heard around the world in recordings and movies.

This new book, written by Orbison’s sons (all in the music business), plus songwriter and veteran music journalist Jeff Slate, presents an “authorized” account of Orbison’s life, career, sudden death from a heart attack, and continued impact on the music world.

Orbison, a singer-songwriter-musician who was born in Vernon, Texas, and achieved his earliest stardom in the West Texas oil town of Wink, tried hard to keep much of his private life, including his marriages, divorces, and children, out of the limelight. But this entertaining, enlightening biography is rich with background details and many previously unpublished photographs from his home life, as well musical concerts and tours with other stars, including Elvis Presley, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, and the Eagles, to name just a few.  >>READ MORE

Texas ReadsGlenn Dromgoole

>> archive

Texas wildflower guide updated, revised

Joe Marcus of the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center headed up the reorganization of the popular book Texas Wildflowers: A Field Guide reissued in a new edition by the University of Texas Press ($19.95 flexbound).

UT Press says the book, first published in 1984 and updated in 2006, has sold more than 175,000 copies. Campbell and Lynn Loughmiller, authors (now deceased) of the first edition with a foreword by Lady Bird Johnson, are still listed as the authors, and Lady Bird’s foreword is included in the new volume.

Marcus explains the biggest change in the organization of the new edition: “The first two editions were organized by family, then by genus and species — the way most botanists would want a book organized. This edition is organized first by flower color, then by flowering time, and finally by genus and species. Our hope is that this new organizational scheme will make the book more useful to novice wildflower enthusiasts by making the identity of their mystery flower easier to find.”

Yet experts needn’t fret. “For those who prefer to search for plants by family name, a family name index is provided in the back of the book.”

However you choose to use it, the new flexbound edition is certainly a welcome, proven, and sturdy guide to the beautiful Texas landscape throughout the year.

Counting colors: Texas children’s author Susan Holt Kralovansky has written a simple and delightful board book that teaches colors and numbers to young children — Spanish as well, since it’s a bilingual book.

Counting Colors in Texas(Pelican Publishing, $9.95, photographs by Robert Crane) starts with one black horse, two orange butterflies, and so on, all the way through nine blue snow cones, and ten purple flowers.

Children will get a kick out of five brown boots upside down on fence posts and three red long johns on a clothesline (Momma, what’s a clothesline?).

Young Adult: Fort Worth best-selling author Rachel Caine has teamed up with Ann Aguirre to write a 465-page young adult science fiction novel, Honor Among Thieves (HarperCollins, $17.99 hardcover), announced as the first of a series.

In the story, Zara Cole doesn’t move with her family to Mars and gets recruited into the Honors, an elite team of humans selected to explore the outer reaches of the universe. The subtitle hints at the plot: “100 were chosen. One will resist.”

* * * * *

Glenn Dromgoole has been writing his Texas Reads column since 2002, focusing on Texas books and authors. Contact him at g.dromgoole@suddenlink.net.

>> Check out his previous Texas Reads columns in Lone Star Literary Life

* * * * *

2018 TEXAS BOOKISH DESTINATIONS

Can you name this literary place in the Lone Star State?

Admit it: bookfans love traveling almost as much as they love reading itself. Beginning March 4, 2018, Lone Star Literary Life will roll out #10 through #6 in our annual list of Top Texas Bookish Destinations, for readers who want to visit the settings of their favorite books, the birthplaces and haunts of favorite authors, and hot spots for book buying, readings, and other literary activity.

     But throughout Texas’s 268,597 square miles, there are also lots of out-of-the-way points of interest that we don’t always have space to cover in our Top Ten pages.

     Watch this space each week for a new bookish place that you’ll want to add to your own travel list. Be the first to email us with the correct identification, and win a prize!

     This week, we continue with a bookish place that’s located in 2017’s #2 Top Bookish Destination. There’s plenty of poetry in this literary-rich city, but there’s a Poet Tree, too. Can you name the city? And extra credit for telling our readers the neighborhood or street where they can find it, too.

Email us at info@LoneStarLiterary.com with the specific right answer, and we’ll send you a free copy of Literary Texas.

LAST MONTH’S PHOTO (below) was correctly identified as the Capitol Gift Shop, inside the state capitol building in Austin. Congratulations — your prize is on the way!