Contributing Editor
HISTORICAL FICTION
Jeff P. Jones
Love Give Us One Death: Bonnie and Clyde in the Last Days
Winner of the George Garrett Fiction Prize
Texas Review Press
Paperback, 978-1-68003-097-6, 384 pages, $18.95; October 25, 2016
BIOGRAPHY
John Boessenecker
Texas Ranger: The Epic Life of Frank Hamer, the Man Who Killed Bonnie and Clyde
Thomas Dunne Books (St. Martin’s Press)
Hardcover, 978-1-250-06998-6, 528 pages, $29.99 (also available in paperback and ebook); April 2016
Reviewed by Si Dunn
Two noteworthy new books offer widely differing perspectives on the final days and violent deaths of outlaws Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker in 1934. And they create an enlightening synergy when read in sequence.
Love Give Us One Death is built around an intriguing mix of experimental fiction, historical accounts, court testimonies, witness statements, shifting viewpoints, photographs, song lyrics and poetry. The novel, Jeff P. Jones’s first book, takes us inside the relationship between Bonnie and Clyde and stays in their minds, at least briefly, even after they die.
Texas Ranger, meanwhile, is a solidly researched, well-written and mostly sympathetic biography of Frank Hamer (pronounced “Hay-mer”). He is credited with leading the manhunt that eventually tracked down and killed Bonnie and Clyde in Louisiana. >>READ MORE
HISTORY
Roth, Mitchel P.
Convict Cowboys: The Untold History of the Texas Prison Rodeo
University of North Texas Press
Hardcover, 978-157441-652-7, 448 pages, $32.95 (ebook also available); July 2016
Reviewed by Si Dunn
Mitchel P. Roth, a criminology and criminal justice professor at Huntsville’s Sam Houston State University, has produced an eye-opening and much-needed look inside the world-famous Texas Prison Rodeo (TPR). His well-researched book includes perspectives on the economic and political forces that led to the TPR’s birth in 1931, as well as to its demise fifty-two years later, in 1986, at the hands of a budget-squeezing Texas legislature.
Today, in what is known as “prison tourism,” millions of people around the world pay good money to tour old prisons, jails, and dungeons and buy incarceration curios in the facilities’ gift shops. From the early days of the American penal system to the twentieth century’s first few decades, many prisons relied on cash from tourists and visitors to help cover their operating expenses. >>READ MORE
Texas ReadsGlenn Dromgoole
>> archive
Cookbooks feature barbecue, enchiladas, chili
Three colorful new cookbooks with a Texas flavor have hit the market this fall.
Texan BBQ: A Smokin’ Good Cookbook by Robert Louis Murphy (New Holland, $35 hardcover) includes a chapter of practical barbecue cooking tips before getting to recipes for beef, lamb, pork, chicken, sides, salsas, marinades, and rubs. Murphy was raised in Breckenridge, Texas, and says that by his teen years, “I could take my hunting rifle and feed fifty people later that day.” He now lives in Australia, where he starred in the TV series My Kitchen Rules.
Sylvia Casares, owner of Sylvia’s Enchilada Kitchen in Houston, has teamed up with veteran food writer Dotty Griffith to produce The Enchilada Queen Cookbook (St. Martin’s, $27.99 hardcover).
Casares was dubbed “The Enchilada Queen” by a Houston magazine ten years ago, and her restaurant has made Top 10 and Top 50 lists from USA Today and Texas Monthly. She says, “I cook enchiladas — and everything — with tender loving care and fresh ingredients. I also take the time to do it right.” Her book focuses on enchiladas but also covers fajitas, tamales, sides, desserts, margaritas and more.
Tiffany Harelik (“rhymes with garlic”) has published a dozen cookbooks herself and conducts workshops on how to write a cookbook. She has even formed her own publishing house specializing in food and travel titles.
Her newest book is The Terlingua Chili Cookbook: Chili’s Last Frontier(Spellbound Publishers, $24.99 paperback), focusing on recipes and stories from chili connoisseurs and cook-off competitors. “It is my hope,” she writes, “that this book preserves the history, people and recipes of the greatest chili cook-off in Texas for all to enjoy.” Read more on her website, tiffanyharelik.com.
Ranger tales: Mike Cox has produced a revised and updated 400-page hardback collection of Texas Ranger Tales: Hard-Riding Stories from the Lone Star State (Lone Star Books, $24.95). Cox, who has also written an authoritative two-volume history of the Rangers, included stories in this handsome new volume from two other collections of Ranger tales he wrote about twenty years ago, as well as some new material.
The fifty stories are arranged chronologically, but each story is self-contained. Cox says, “This is a book you can read from cover to cover, or browse at your leisure.” When it comes to telling stories about the old-time and modern-day Rangers, no one makes them come alive better than Mike Cox.
Glenn Dromgoole’s latest book is West Texas StoriesContact him at g.dromgoole@suddenlink.net.
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