Texas ReadsGlenn Dromgoole
>> archiveTower sniper terrorized UT fifty years ago
Shortly before noon on Monday, Aug. 1, 1966, twenty-five-year-old Charles Whitman carried a footlocker full of weapons and ammunition to the top of the thirty-story Tower at the University of Texas and opened fire on the unsuspecting pedestrians below.
The slaughter — 14 dead, 32 injured — continued for nearly an hour and a half until Whitman was himself killed by Austin police.
Whitman’s death toll reached seventeen, including his wife and mother whom he murdered before taking over the tower’s observation deck. One of the thirty-two injured would die years later, ruled a homicide dating back to the wound Whitman inflicted.
A comprehensive new book by an Austin father and son team, Monte Akers and Nathan Akers, retraces the full story leading up to the mass murders and the resulting aftermath.
Tower Sniper: The Terror of America’s First Active Shooter on Campus (John M. Hardy Publishing, $24.95 hardcover) comes out this week in conjunction with the upcoming fiftieth anniversary of the sniper attack. A trade paperback edition ($14.95) will be available in a few weeks, the publisher said.
Dr. Roger Friedman, a clinical psychologist, wrote the foreword and a chapter reflecting on the traumatic legacy of the Whitman massacre. One of Friedman’s closest childhood friends was killed that day. In spite of the tragic loss of life, the authors write, the Tower story also brought out the best in people who reacted courageously and unselfishly. “It is the story of people who did not look or walk away when they saw strangers in need,” they conclude. “It is a story of humans at their finest.”
Upbeat stories: My brother Charlie Dromgoole, who lives in College Station, has penned a collection of stories laughing about and reflecting on his forty-two-year career as a chamber of commerce executive.
Chamber Stories That I Can Tell (and some that I probably shouldn’t!) is not a how-to book about chamber management, but rather a personal, often humorous, look at situations and personalities he encountered along the way.
The forty-five pieces deal with his experiences in nine communities, including eight in Texas — Jasper, Brenham, Port Arthur, Sherman, Abilene, Round Rock, Lufkin, and Humble-Kingwood.
One of the funniest stories — “You Don’t Have to Be a History Buff to Be a Chamber Buff” — concerns a community effort to bring the Magna Carta to Sherman. On a more serious note, he reflects on Abilene’s successful campaign to be named an All-America City in 1990. The book ($11.95 paperback) is available online at texasstartrading.com or contact the author at charliedromgoole@gmail.com.
Glenn Dromgoole is co-author of 101 Essential Texas Books. Contact him at g.dromgoole@suddenlink.net.
>> Check out his previous Texas Reads columns in Lone Star Literary Life
Viking
Hardcover, 978-0-451-47634-0 (also available as an ebook, audio book, and on Audible), 352 pgs., $17.99; July 12, 2016
Spunky Megan McKnight is a twenty-year-old soccer player at Southern Methodist University with dreams of making the Olympic team. The Bluebonnet Club Debutante Season is the very last thing on her mind. Then a story (“an announcement for a virgin auction”) appears in the local paper declaring that Megan and her twin sister Julia are debuting this season, complete with photographs (Megan thinks she looks “like a hick who’d lucked into a makeover coupon”), and Megan realizes that her mother has pulled a fast one.
When Megan confronts her mother (“Clearly decades of coloring your hair and chugging SlimFast have taken a toll”), she learns that there is more to her mother’s madness than she knows and she agrees to debut as a favor to her father. The Season, the first novel from screenwriters Jonah Lisa Dyer and Stephen Dyer, is a romantic comedy, a modern YA riff on Jane Austen that is my pick, so far, for best beach read this summer. >>READ MORE
Veliz Books
Paperback, 978-0-9969134-0-9, 216 pgs., $16.95; January 2016
Themes of boundaries, loneliness, identity, opportunity, and responsibility permeate this collection of contemporary short fiction set in and around El Paso, Texas. Paul Pedroza possesses a versatile voice, able to create a diverse cast of compelling narratives: young and old, male and female, Anglo, Mexican, and Mexican-American, immigrants and residents, and a variety of socioeconomic classes, even the dead—the encobijados, dead bodies wrapped in blankets and dumped by narcotraficantes. Pedroza is also equally at home with a variety of styles, from slice-of-life to the fantastical.
The Dead Will Rise and Save Us: Stories by Paul Pedroza is Pedroza’s debut collection, although a handful of these stories have appeared previously in publications such as New Border Voices (Texas A&M University Press, 2014) and MAKE: A Chicago Magazine, Issue 12 (Winter 2012). >>READ MORE
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