Contributing Editor

AUTOBIOGRAPHY / MUSIC

Gary P. Nunn

At Home with the Armadillo

Greenleaf Book Group Press

Hardcover, 978-1-62634-487-7 (also available in e-book format), 336, pages, $24.95

January 2018

Reviewed by Si Dunn

Early in 1972, singer-songwriter-musician Gary P. Nunn was ready to quit performing, leave Texas, and move back to his home state, Oklahoma.

At age 26, he admits in At Home with the Armadillo, “I had had a butt-full of the music business as it had led me to nothing but heartache and misery.” His new plan was to help his uncles with their farming and ranching until he could figure out what next to do with his life.

Nunn, or Gary P., as he sometimes is called in his new autobiography, had been playing bass guitar in rock bands since junior high school in Brownfield, Texas, in the late 1950s. Now he had his pickup packed and was ready to go. But he decided, spur of the moment, to stay in Austin a couple of days longer so he could see a live performance by a rising star he greatly admired: Texas singer-songwriter Michael Martin Murphey.  >>READ MORE

POETRY

Carmen Tafolla, edited by Bryce Milligan

New and Selected Poems

Hardcover, 978-0-87565-689-2, 96 pp.,  $19.95

Texas A&M University Press

TCU Texas Poets Laureate Series

June 15, 2018

Reviewed by Natalia Treviño

The first burst of delicacies in Carmen Tafolla’s New and Selected Poems. A tribute to her accomplishments, roots, and activism by Bryce Milligan. The sweets that waterfall out? Eclectic, sensuous, and unabashed poetics of a fierce Chicana.

     As I read this collection, I was reminded how fortunate I am to live in the city whose praises she frequently sings and whose sorrows and injustices she laments. This is one of the bright piñatas in this book for San Antonio readers, but the big prize goes to a much wider population. Needed in a time filled with such negative rhetoric about immigrants and Mexicans, this book feeds its readers pride in their cultura, in its Indigenous wisdom from the voice of a nurturer-mother Earth: “I have squeezed cilantro into the breast milk/ made sure you were nurtured with the taste / of green life.”  >>READ MORE

Texas ReadsGlenn Dromgoole

>> archive

5.6.2018  Joanna Gaines shares some of her favorite recipes

Joanna Gaines of “Fixer Upper” fame has a new cookbook, Magnolia Table: A Collection of Recipes for Gathering (William Morrow, $29.99 hardcover).

As you would expect, it’s very well done, with 300 pages full of recipes, color photos, and running commentary.

Some of the recipes are from Joanna and Chip’s newly opened Magnolia Table restaurant in Waco, at the old Elite Café location. She begins the book with a few pages about the ingredients she always tries to keep on hand in her pantry and a discussion of the kitchen tools she uses most frequently. Then it’s on to the food, divided into seven categories: breakfast, lunch, soups and salads, appetizers and starters, side dishes, dinner, and desserts.

A few of the appealing selections for breakfast: asparagus and Fontina quiche, JoJo’s biscuits, garlic cheese grits, ham and cheese bread pudding, and cinnamon squares (“my kids’ favorite breakfast,” Joanna writes).

For lunch, how about the hefty Gaines Brothers Burger, flatbread pizza with prosciutto and potatoes, or grilled Havarti, tomato and basil sandwiches?

Dinner entrees range from King Ranch chicken with Mexican-style jicama salad to Jo’s fatayer meat pies to Gaines family chili, meat loaf, and beef stew.

You wouldn’t want to skip desserts like Aunt Opal’s banana pudding, buttermilk blueberry puff, lemon pie, and mocha trifle cups.

Well, there’s a lot more, but you get the idea. And if you’re interested in trying some of these recipes at the Waco restaurant, it’s open from 6 a.m. to 3 p.m. Monday through Saturday — first come, first served, no reservations, according to the website. I imagine you should be prepared to wait.

Veteran cemeteries: In The Veterans Cemeteries of Texas, retired Lt. Col. Michael Lee Lanning tells the stories of the ten burial sites in Texas reserved for military veterans and their families (Texas A&M University Press, $29.95 hardcover).

With text and color pictures, Lanning relates each cemetery’s history as well as vignettes about some of the more notable veterans buried there. He also offers practical information about eligibility requirements and floral policies.

Texas has six national VA cemeteries — San Antonio, Fort Sam Houston (also San Antonio), Kerrville, Fort Bliss, Houston and Dallas–Fort Worth — as well as state veteran cemeteries at Killeen, Mission, Abilene and Corpus Christi.

Now in paperback: Karl Jacoby’s The Strange Career of William Ellis: The Texas Slave Who Became a Mexican Millionaire is now available in a trade paperback edition (Norton, $16.95).

Born in Victoria, Texas, in 1864, Ellis would become a cattle trader, stock broker and entrepreneur who crossed national boundaries and racial lines with ease. He established a short-lived colony in Mexico for African-Americans, purchased a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, and had international business holdings, sometimes passing himself off as Mexican or Cuban. He died in Mexico in 1923.

Glenn Dromgoole writes about Texas books and authors. Contact him at g.dromgoole@suddenlink.net.

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

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2018 TEXAS BOOKISH DESTINATIONS

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

Okay, one last chance at the prize, before National Poetry Month comes to an end April 30!

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!