PUBLIC AFFAIRS

Dr. Robert Brescia

The Americanism of John Ben Shepperd

Infinity Publishing

Paperback, 390 pages, with numerous b/w images, 978-1-4958-0831-9, $22.95

November 1, 2015

John Ben Shepperd (1915–1990) was a Texas secretary of state and Texas attorney general in the 1950s. After he left state government in 1957, he continued in public service as director, chairman, or president of thirty-two organizations that ranged from the Texas Historical Commission and U.S. Jaycees Foundation to the Baylor College of Dentistry and University of Texas Centennial Commission.

Shepperd was a major proponent of “Americanism,” which the author of this book, Dr. Robert Brescia, describes as “a complex ideology…a worldview or conviction giving special importance to our nation within the world of nations. It is a belief in the preeminence of our ‘way of life’ among all others – that our way of American life is special and more desirable than others.”

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Texas ReadsGlenn Dromgoole

>> archiveAuthor documents black holocaust in Texas

Black Holocaust: The Paris Horror and a Legacy of Texas Terror by E. R. Bills (Eakin Press, $19.95 paperback) documents cases of forty black men and one Hispanic man being burned at the stake in Texas by vigilantes from 1861 to 1933 after being accused of murder, rape and other crimes.

“Burning a living, breathing human being at the stake,” Bills writes, “is never simply a matter of murder or lynching. It’s an act of terror, monstrosity and madness.

“This book,” he warns readers, “chronicles a period of holocaust and human cinder. If you’re fragile — white or black — this is not a book for you.” Read more at eakinpress.com.

Free blacks: Free Blacks in Antebellum Texas (University of North Texas Press, $45 hardcover) is a collection of essays written by two University of Texas students in the 1930s and 1940s that were published in various journals but never in book form until now. Historians Bruce Glasrud of San Antonio and Milton S. Jordan of Georgetown edited the book and wrote the introduction to the essays by Harold R. Schoen on free blacks in the Republic of Texas and Andrew Forest Muir on free blacks after Texas became a state. Read more at untpress.unt.edu.

Medieval novel: “If West Texas farmers, ranchers or small-town people had lived in a wild and warlike part of England before it was England,” poses Canyon novelist Donald Mace Williams, “how would they have responded to the hard, close-to-nature work, the wars and the subservient life?” Williams’s novel, The Sparrow and the Hall (Bagwyn Books, $12.95 paperback), is set in the turbulent seventh century in Northumbria and involves war, plague, and an ordeal by boiling water.

Williams, a retired journalist and professor, said he based the characters in his novel “largely on people I know and love” in West Texas. A Beowulf scholar, Williams earlier published a poetry chapbook, Wolfe, a retelling of the Beowulf-Grendel story in a Texas setting.

Read more about The Sparrow and the Hall at acmrs.org. Bagwyn Books is an imprint of the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.

West Texas teacher: Retired Iraan teacher Charlena Chandler has republished a memoir of essays about her years as a teacher, with sections dealing with literature, football, cheerleading, school publications and extracurricular activities. The book came out last year as Dead Javelinas Are Not Allowed on School Property. But now she’s given it a more dignified title perhaps more in keeping with the subject matter: Shakespeare on the Pecos. It’s $15.95 paperback. Read more at iuniverse.com.

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Glenn Dromgoole is co-author, with Carlton Stowers, of 101 Essential Texas Books Contact him at g.dromgoole@suddenlink.net.

>> Check out his previous Texas Reads columns in Lone Star Lit

Lone Star Literary Life to introduce new features, crowdfunding in celebration of first anniversary Feb. 2

On February 2, 2015, Lone Star Literary Life published its first issue of Texas’s only comprehensive statewide books-news coverage. We launched on Groundhog Day with a robust subscriber list of Texas booksellers, publishers, libraries, authors, and, most important of all, readers.

We pledged to deliver thoughtful reviews of new Texas books, first-person profiles and interviews of Texas authors, news and coverage of awards, festivals, and author tours, and the state’s only full calendar of book events — every week. And we’ve done so for almost 52 weeks now, bringing readers, writers, publishers, publicists, and librarians the latest in bookish Texas news and information.

We’re supported by advertising, providing a guaranteed vehicle to promote Texas-related books. And in our first year, we introduced such popular features as Lone Star Book Blog Tours, author podcasts, and Top Texas Bookish Destinations, which present editorial content around which publishers, booksellers, and authors can build paid campaigns.

We’ve got even bigger plans in store for 2016. Stay tuned over the next few weeks. And watch for details on our Indiegogo campaign — to learn how you can help Lone Star Lit grow and also earn unique perks.

Make a note of our hashtag: #LoneStarLit2016

• Carolrhoda Lab

  Hardcover, 978-1467742023 (also available as an ebook), 408 pgs., $18.99

  September 1, 2015

  Henry Smith moves his children, twins Cari and Beto, along with his stepdaughter and their half-sister, Naomi, to New London, Texas, in 1936, where he works in the new booming oil industry. Henry is Anglo, Naomi is Mexican, and the twins are half-and-half. Naomi, hating Henry and blaming him for her mother’s death, doesn’t belong anywhere — the owner of the whites-only grocery (“No Negroes, Mexicans, or dogs” reads the sign in the window) won’t let her shop there and the owner of the grocery for blacks is nervous when she brings the twins, who pass for white. Naomi finds kindness, acceptance, and, eventually, love, with Wash Fuller, a black boy who does odd jobs for the school. Influenced by historical accounts of the 1937 explosion of the New London School, Ashley Hope Pérez uses the explosion to bring the conflicts to a shattering conclusion. >>READ MORE

• Bright Sky Press

  Hardcover, 978-1-939055-91-0, 295 pgs., $24.95

  November 4, 2015

  Mica Mosbacher’s husband Robert, oilman and former United States Secretary of Commerce, died of pancreatic cancer in 2010. Newly widowed and casting about for purpose to get her through, she found inspiration in Godstone Ranch Motorsports, an organization involved in Formula One racing for charity. Because there is no “Widowhood for Dummies book,” Mosbacher attempts to fill that void. Employing an auto racing metaphor, she provides guidance through “widow’s fog.”

  A handsome and well-designed volume, Racing Forward: Faith, Love and Triumph Over Loss is Mica Mosbacher’s memoir that addresses the many varieties of loss — death, “break-ups, divorce, injury, disabilities, illness, friendships and careers, even a loss of innocence” — and how loss may be worked through, learned from, and, finally, moved past, a process she terms “grieving forward.” >>READ MORE