As 2015 slips to a close the editors of Lone Star Literary Life would like to say thank you to all of the authors who have written books about our state or set in our state, but we’d like pay special recognition this week to our Favorite Texas Nonfiction of 2015.
What constitutes Texas nonfiction? To our way of thinking, it’s true stories of the Lone Star State’s history, people, culture, land and landscape, and so on, past or present. But occasionally there’s a great book about or by a Texan who left home and reflects on the experience — as in the case with one travel memoir that made our list this year — or about Texans who went on to gain even greater fame on a world stage, as with a couple of this year’s political biographies.
Our biggest challenge was narrowing the selection down to an arbitrary ten. We could easily have included triple this number, given the wonderful cookbooks and pictorials, and the many excellent scholarly works, produced about Texas by publishers this year. We hope you’ll check out the Lone Star Literary Life backlist index for 2015, to discover other books through our reviews, notices, and interviews.
Here’s our list, in no particular order.
History
JAN JARBOE RUSSELL
Scribner, 978-1-4516-9366-9, 400 pp., $30.00
From 1942 to 1948 at Crystal City in the south Texas desert thirty miles from the Mexican border, the federal government operated the only family internment camp in the world in World War II. Approximately 6,000 German, Italian, and Japanese civilians—termed “dangerous enemy aliens” and their American born children—were held indefinitely without charge or trial. The Train to Crystal City is thoroughly researched narrative nonfiction written in a style that makes history engaging and accessible for all. Read Lone Star Literary Life’s review here.
Memoir
RANDY FRITZ
Hail of Fire: A Man and His Family Face Natural Disaster
Trinity University Press, hardcover, 978-1595342591 (also available as ebook), 320 pages, $24.95
Hail of Fire: A Man and His Family Face Natural Disaster is Randy Fritz’s memoir about the Bastrop County, Texas, wildfire of 2011 — the most destructive in Texas history — that incinerated the Lost Pines area (almost fifty-five square miles) and left nearly 1,700 families (including the Fritz family) homeless. Fritz viscerally conveys the horror, loss, and regret he experienced. Fritz’s engaging narrative is interwoven with flashbacks that serve to flesh out his family’s lives and powerfully convey what has been lost. Wounded and brought low by nature, Fritz is also healed by her. In the end he makes a tentative peace with the fire. Read Lone Star Literary Life’s review here.
Biography
SANDRA CISNEROS
A House of My Own: Stories from My Life
Alfred A. Knopf, hardcover, 978-0-385-35133-1 (also available as ebook and audiobook), 400 pgs., $28.95
A House of My Own: Stories from My Life is Cisneros’s autobiography of sorts, an assemblage of nonfiction pieces spanning the years 1984 through 2014. Constructed in much the same manner as The House on Mango Street — vignettes that, taken together, describe a whole — the work in A House of My Own is taken from essays, lectures, feature articles, travel pieces, introductions written for art books, museum catalogs, letters. Read Lone Star Literary Life’s review here.
History
RICHARD PAUL AND STEVEN MOSS
We Could Not Fail: The First African Americans in the Space Program
University of Texas Press, 274 pgs., 978-0-292-77249-6, hardcover, $30.00
President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the executive order creating the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in 1958. For the past six decades, that agency has pushed the limits of human presence in space. But the image of NASA’s white, male, pocket protector–toting engineers and technicians who put America’s astronauts into space—the image that we know so well from Tom Wolfe’s iconic book The Right Stuff—misses an important cadre of NASA employees. In We Could Not Fail, Richard Paul and Steven Moss tell the story of the African American men who worked for NASA in the 1960s, breaking racial barriers not just in one of the most elite organizations in America, but also in the American South during the height of the Civil Rights era. Read Lone Star Literary Life’s review here.
Biography
R. GAINES BATY
Champion of the Barrio: The Legacy of Coach Buryl Baty
Texas A&M University Press, 978-1-62349-266-3, hardcover, 288 pgs., $24.95
Champion of the Barrio: The Legacy of Coach Buryl Baty is the latest biography in Texas A&M University Press’s Spirit of Sport: A Series of Books Focusing on Sport in Modern Society. The author, older son of Coach Baty, undertook this project as a way to learn more about the father he hardly remembered, to see the man through the eyes of those he touched so deeply before he was taken so tragically and so young. A member of the Greatest Generation, Buryl Baty grew up during the Great Depression in Paris, Texas. A high school football star, he earned a full ride to play Aggie football. His college career was interrupted by World War II, during which Baty served in both the European and Pacific theaters as an Army combat engineer. After returning and completing a successful college career, he was drafted by the Detroit Lions but chose instead to dedicate his life to teaching and coaching young people. Read Lone Star Literary Life’s review here.
Memoir / Travel
KIMBERLY MEYER
The Book of Wanderings: A Mother-Daughter Pilgrimage
Little, Brown, hardcover, 978-0-316-25121-1 (also available as ebook and audiobook), 368 pages, $27.00
The Book of Wanderings: A Mother-Daughter Pilgrimage by Houston professor Kimberly Meyer is equal parts memoir, travelogue, philosophical treatise, and love letter to her firstborn daughter, Ellie. Meyer yearned for a “bohemian-explorer-intellectual kind of life” but became pregnant in her senior year of college. After Ellie is born, Meyer attends grad school, marries, and gives birth to two more daughters. She sets aside youthful ambitions until she comes across The Book of the Wanderings of Brother Felix Fabri in the Holy Land, Arabia, and Egypt during dissertation research, a discovery that reawakens those earlier dreams. With self-deprecating humor and gentle irony, Meyer describes their travels, attempts peace with dread of the rapidly approaching empty nest, and searches for spiritual solace that has always eluded her, struggling to balance the push of “pure possibility” and the pull of the familiar. Meyer and eighteen-year-old Ellie embark on a trip following Father Fabri’s footsteps: beginning in Ulm, Germany, proceeding south through Italy to Greece, across the Mediterranean to Israel and the Palestinian Territories, then south again into the Sinai desert, arriving two months later in Cairo. Read Lone Star Literary Life’s review here.
Memoir
GARY CARTWRIGHT
University of Texas Press, 978-0-292-74907-8, hardcover, 272 pages; with photos, $27.95,
The Best I Recall is an earnest and painfully honest (“…that’s who I was – who I am – careless, self-centered, impulsive, and egotistical beyond all telling.”) but rather ordinary account of an extraordinary life. It’s the story of the evolution of an innocent. “We were a generation in which sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll had replaced sock hops, Juicy Fruit, and Patti Page.” The often sobriety-challenged Cartwright’s list of friends and acquaintances includes famous and/or infamous names every Texan recognizes: Blackie Sherrod, Dan Jenkins, Jack Ruby, Lamar and Bunker Hunt, Billy Lee Brammer, Don Meredith, Larry L. King, Warren Burnett, Ann Richards, Willie Nelson and, of course, his soul mate, Bud Shrake. Cartwright knows which closets the skeletons can be found in. Read Lone Star Literary Life’s review here.
KATHY CRUZ
Dateline Purgatory: Examining the Case That Sentenced Darlie Routier to Death
Texas Christian University Press, 978-0-87565-610-6, 224 pages, 6 x 9 • Paper $22.95
In Dateline Purgatory, award-winning journalist Kathy Cruz enlists current-day legal experts to weigh in on the shocking transgressions that resulted in one of the country’s most controversial death penalty convictions. With the help of the infamous death row inmate and a former FBI Special Agent known as “Crimefighter,” Cruz would find that her journey through Purgatory was as much about herself as it was about the woman dubbed “Dallas’s Susan Smith.”
JON MEACHAM
Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush
Random House, 978-1400067657, hardcover, 864 pages, $35.00
Jon Meacham, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author, chronicles the life of George Herbert Walker Bush. Drawing on President Bush’s personal diaries, on the diaries of his wife, Barbara, and on extraordinary access to the forty-first president and his family, Meacham paints an intimate and surprising portrait of an intensely private man who led the nation through tumultuous times. From the Oval Office to Camp David, from his study in the private quarters of the White House to Air Force One, from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the first Gulf War to the end of Communism, Destiny and Power charts the thoughts, decisions, and emotions of a modern president who may have been the last of his kind. This is the human story of a man who was, like the nation he led, at once noble and flawed.
BETTY BOYD CAROLI
Lady Bird and Lyndon: The Hidden Story of a Marriage That Made a President
Simon and Schuster, hardcover, 978-1439191224, 480 pages, $29.99
A fresh look at Lady Bird Johnson that upends her image as a plain Jane who was married for her money and mistreated by Lyndon. This Lady Bird worked quietly behind the scenes through every campaign, every illness, and a trying presidency as a key strategist, fundraiser, barnstormer, peacemaker, and indispensable therapist.
Lady Bird grew up the daughter of a domineering father and a cultured but fragile mother. When a tall, pushy Texan named Lyndon showed up in her life, she knew what she wanted: to leave the rural Texas of her childhood and experience the world like her mother dreamed, while climbing the mountain of ambition she inherited from her father. She married Lyndon within weeks, and the bargain they struck was tacitly agreed upon in the courtship letters they exchanged: this highly gifted politician would take her away, and she would save him from his weaknesses.
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