Texas ReadsGlenn Dromgoole
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Texas soldiers helped liberate concentration camps
More than 300 Texans were among the troops who helped liberate the Nazi concentration camps at the end of World War II, and they’re listed in a remarkable book, The Texas Liberators: Veteran Narratives from World War II (Texas Tech University Press, $29.95 hardcover).
It seems appropriate, on this Veterans Day, to appreciate the service of these men who observed first-hand the unfathomable cruelty, starvation, filth, stench, disease, depravity and death in the prison camps.
Twenty-one of the Texans related their personal experiences to Baylor University oral historians a few years ago. Excerpts from their interviews make up the bulk of the book, edited by Aliza S. Wong with contemporary photographs of some of the liberators by Mark Umstot.
The book was produced as part of the effort by the Texas Holocaust and Genocide Commission to “help ensure that educators in Texas have the guidance and resources necessary to teach children the lessons of the Holocaust and other contemporary genocides.” The THGC, established by the Texas Legislature in 2009, provided a copy of the book to each of the 3,709 public and private high schools in Texas. Read more about THGC on its website, thgc.texas.gov.
Ray Buchanan, pictured on the book’s cover, said: “I’ve never seen such a sight in my life… dead people in carloads, and (others) walking around there with no flesh, just bones… thousands and thousands of them. Just made me sick. The smell was awful. I just couldn’t stand it.”
Another Texan, Ben Love, reflected on the horrors he witnessed: “You just can’t imagine how man, civilized man … how they could have inflicted that cruelty here in this century on people who had never harmed them, innocent people.”
Hall of Fame: Thirty-one Texas Rangers have been inducted into the Texas Rangers Hall of Fame in Waco. Historian Darren L. Ivey is producing an encyclopedic three-volume set chronicling the lives of the iconic lawmen.
The first volume came out last year from the University of North Texas Press, and now UNT Press has released The Ranger Ideal: Texas Rangers in the Hall of Fame, Volume 2, which weighs in at a hefty 816 pages, including nearly 300 pages of end notes, bibliographical references, and index ($45 hardcover).
This volume includes thirty- to fifty-page profiles of John B. Jones, Leander McNelly, John B. Armstrong, James B. Gillett, Jesse L. Hall, George W. Baylor, Bryan Marsh, Ira Aten, James A. Brooks, William J. McDonald, John R. Hughes and John H. Rogers, all of whom served between 1874 and 1930.
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Glenn Dromgoole’s most recent book is The Book Guy. Contact him atg.dromgoole@suddenlink.net.
>> Check out his previous Texas Reads columns in Lone Star Literary Life
William Morrow
Trade paperback, 978-0-0626-9344-1 (also available as an e-book and an audio-book), 432 pgs., $15.99
August 2018
Katie Garret is having a bad week — she’s been fired from her marketing design position; she’s failed to get pregnant this month, too; and she just accepted delivery of her husband Liam’s new $240 trousers. Then her mother, Georgina (a real piece of work, this one), calls to tell her that Grandma Margaret has died and Katie is named in the will. Katie, newly unemployed and un-enamored with her husband, decides to make the trip from Boston to rural East Texas, a kind of vacation from her real life. “She’d have a baby when she was meant to,” Katie thinks. “She’d get to New London and discover she’d inherited a fortune, or a pittance; she’d go to Dallas and bond with her mother or argue with her. All of it would be fine.”
But even after the mugging and the appearance of astonishing cousin Scarlett and being mistaken for a vagrant and then a burglar and uncovering the clues that gradually reveal generations of family secrets that echo loudly into the present, Katie is worrying about the wrong things. “The thing she really ought to be worrying about,” Grant writes, “was that Texas would seep into her pores and take root.”
The Daisy Children: A Novel is new fiction from Sofia Grant, whom y’all probably know better as Sophie Littlefield, author of more than two dozen books in many genres including YA, apocalyptic fiction, thriller, domestic suspense, and women’s fiction, this last being assigned to The Daisy Children metadata. This is unfairly reductive; what it should say is a carefully and elegantly constructed exploration of a hundred years of dysfunctional family relationships, the nature of secrets, and the potential for healing. >>READ MORE
Touchstone
Hardcover, 978-1-5011-8759-9 (also available as an e-book and an audio-book), 304 pgs., $27.00
April 3, 2018
“Little lady, you are just trying to make trouble.” —Sixth-grade teacher at University Park Elementary in Dallas
“Well behaved women seldom make history.” —Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Pulitzer-Prize–winning professor of early American history at Harvard University
Cecile Richards was raised on campaigns and social justice, growing up in the political salon of her parents’ living room in the John-Bircher Dallas of the 1960s. The Richards family decamped for Austin, where they “tossed out their Frank Sinatra records for Jefferson Airplane,” the salon included Molly Ivins and Sarah Weddington, and seventh-grader Cecile felt freer to make her first independent political statement, wearing a homemade black armband to school to protest the Vietnam War.
This child of the People’s Governor left Austin to attend Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, where she met like-minded idealistic young activists and realized that “history wasn’t just something to read about in books — it was being made right in front of us.” Cecile went on to become a labor organizer and founded the Texas Freedom Network, the Texas Faith Network, and America Votes, all while juggling the responsibilities of wife and mother with an assist from husband Kirk Adams, whom she met during a campaign to unionize hospitality workers in New Orleans. Most recently Cecile was president of Planned Parenthood, where she led the organization in defeating Trumpcare; beat back multiple attempts to defund their work; and led the organization into politics as never before with their first candidate endorsements. >>READ MORE
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