Photographer sees Texas from a mile above
This has been quite a year for elegant coffee-table books about Texas. I’ve mentioned four of them in previous columns, but here are two more that have come to my attention.
A Mile Above Texas by Jay B. Sauceda is a spectacular collection of color aerial photographs of the great diversity of Texas landscapes, seascapes and cityscapes taken in six days from the author’s single-engine Cessna (University of Texas Press, $45 hardcover).
Sauceda merged his two great passions — photography and flying — as he shot 44,085 photographs while flying more than 3,600 miles mostly around the state’s perimeter in July 2015. From those 44,000 images, the author and publisher narrowed down the selections to about 120 to include in the 196-page, 9¾-by-13-inch coffee table book.
From the contrasting colors of farm land near Austwell and Texline to the beaches of South Padre Island to the mountains of Big Bend to a dairy operation outside Muleshoe to a sunset over Galveston Bay, Saucedo invites readers to see Texas in a fresh new way.
At the beginning of each section, he includes a few notes describing that day’s flight path and weather encountered along the way.
A Mile Above Texas would make a great gift for that pilot, or aspiring pilot, on your Christmas list.
The Texas Hill Country: A Photographic Adventure by Michael H. Marvins offers readers a gorgeous tour of the central part of Texas, ranging from swimming holes and country stores to wildlife and bucking broncs (Texas A&M University Press, $38 hardcover).
Of course, bluebonnets and wildflowers figure prominently in the pages and grace the cover. But there are also platters of barbecue, cool clear streams, ripe peaches and grapes, guitar pickers and dance halls, sunrises and sunsets, campfires and canoes, cowboys and fall colors, and much more.
Marvins divides his 254-page presentation into seven Hill Country regions and concludes with a 35-page Hill Country Road Trip that appropriately sums up the experience in 78 photos. And, of course, there has to be a dead armadillo on his back on a country road!
The author, who divides his time between Houston and a vacation home near Hunt, is donating his proceeds from the book to the Texas Parks and Wildlife Foundation.
Houston Chronicle columnist Joe Holley and photography curator Roy Flukinger contribute insightful opening essays about the lure and beauty of the region.
Those other four coffee-table books I have written about this year are: Horses of the American West: Portrayals by Twenty-Four Artists (A&M, $40), As Far As You Can See: Picturing Texas (UT, $45), Seasons at Selah: The Legacy of Bamberger Ranch Preserve (A&M, $40) and Lost, Texas: Photographs of Forgotten Buildings (A&M, $40).
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Glenn Dromgoole’s most recent book is The Book Guy. Contact him at g.dromgoole@suddenlink.net. Contact him at g.dromgoole@suddenlink.net.
>> Check out his previous Texas Reads columns in Lone Star Literary Life
William Morrow Paperbacks
Paperback, 978-0-0628-3605-2 (also available in hardcover, as an e-book, and an audio-book), 240 pgs., $15.99
October 2, 2018
The year is 1944 and the Brownwood Lions may have to cancel their football season because their coach has just been killed in France. As World War II rages on, the men are either gone, in the process of leaving, or have returned from away, worse for wear or in a pine box. Tylene Wilson, who has learned football at her father’s knee, is the assistant principal of Brownwood High School. Worried that the senior boys — without the distraction, pomp, and circumstance of Texas high-school football — will quit school and enlist before their time, Wilson forms a committee and searches for a suitable man to recruit as the Lions’ football coach. When that plan comes to naught, Wilson decides to take on the role herself.
Though Wilson is a fixture of Brownwood society, intelligent, thoughtful, and respected, these qualities are not enough to insulate her from the disdain and disapproval of those she thought her friends and the threats and intimidation from those she thought might be thankful that someone — even a woman — has cared enough to risk friendships, finances, career potential, and even physical safety in order to preserve the town through the communal ritual and save the football season and the boys who would play it.
When the Men Were Gone: A Novel is debut historical fiction from Fort Worth’s Marjorie Herrera Lewis. Lewis is a former reporter for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and the Dallas Morning News and beat writer covering the Dallas Cowboys — and now a member of the Texas Wesleyan University football coaching staff. >>READ MORE
Little, Brown Spark
Hardcover, 978-0-3164-3806-3 (also available as an e-book and an audio-book), 304 pgs., $28.00
September 18, 2018
“Don’t worry. Do something.”
On April 15, 1931, Plennie Wingo, 36, of Abilene, Texas, donned a pin-striped suit, a tie, a fedora, and a pair of sunglasses specially fitted with side rear-view mirrors and set out to traverse the world walking backward. Wingo’s café, which fed and housed him and his wife and daughter during the Roaring Twenties, went belly-up as the country plunged into the darkness of what would become known as the Great Depression. Wingo’s arrest for serving alcohol during the folly of Prohibition didn’t help, either.
Wingo claimed to be trying to earn some money to provide for his family and maybe that was originally the impetus, but Wingo carried on with his stunt after none of his attempts to be sponsored — preferably by the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce in return for global advertising in the form of a sandwich board, then maybe by a shoe manufacturer, then hopefully by a company that made rubber soles for footwear — panned out. Wingo financed his Grand Tour by selling postcards of himself facing backward (but who could discern that from a photograph?). Surprisingly, the postcard sales worked pretty well.
Oh, the places he went and the sights he saw! During his grand adventure, Wingo depended upon the kindness of strangers and was (usually) not disappointed. He walked 2,000 some-odd miles across sixteen states, from Fort Worth to Boston, where he got a berth, in return for his labor, on the Seattle Spirit (which would be torpedoed the very next year by a German submarine) headed for Hamburg, Germany. He ultimately made it as far as Istanbul, Turkey (where he had tea with Queen Maria of Yugoslavia), backward-walking. >>READ MORE
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