In this final issue of Lone Star Literary Life of 2016, the editors of Lone Star Lit 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 to our Favorite Texas Nonfiction of 2016.
We winnowed down an internal list of titles reviewed in Lone Star Literary issues during 2016 and placed it out on our social media as a survey.
This year’s selections reflect the diversity, tastes, and range of the state and its readers, from history to memoir, true crime, and ecology. Here’s our list, in no particular order, with publishers’ descriptions and links to Lone Star Literary Life’s reviews and interviews.
And of course, you still have a full week for gift-buying—and more than a week remaining in 2016 to catch up with us on your reading!
MEMOIR/TRAVELOGUE
Clara Bensen
No Baggage: A Minimalist Tale of Love and Wandering
Running Press
Hardcover, 9780762457243 (ebook also available), 288 pgs., $26.00
January 5, 2016
Newly recovered from a quarter-life meltdown, Clara Bensen decided to test her comeback by signing up for an online dating account. She never expected to meet Jeff, a wildly energetic university professor with a reputation for bucking convention. They barely know each other’s last names when they agree to set out on a risky travel experiment spanning eight countries and three weeks. The catch? No hotel reservations, no plans, and best of all, no baggage.
Clara’s story will resonate with adventurers and homebodies alike—it’s at once a romance, a travelogue, and a bright modern take on the age-old questions: How do you find the courage to explore beyond your comfort zone? Can you love someone without the need for labels and commitment? Is it possible to truly leave your baggage behind?
Read Lone Star Literary Life’s review here.
MEMOIR/TEXAS
Shelley Armitage
Walking the Llano:
A Texas Memoir of Place
University of Oklahoma Press
Hardcover, 978-0-8061-5162-5 (ebook also available), 216 pgs., $24.95
February 15, 2016
Reminiscent of the work of Terry Tempest Williams and John McPhee, Walking the Llano is both a celebration of an oft-overlooked region and a soaring testimony to the power of the landscape to draw us into greater understanding of ourselves and others by experiencing a deeper connection with the places we inhabit.
When American explorers crossed the Texas Panhandle, they dubbed it part of the “Great American Desert.” A “sea of grass,” the Llano appeared empty, flat, and barely habitable. Contemporary developments—cell phone towers, oil rigs, and wind turbines—have only added to this stereotype. Yet in this lyrical eco-memoir, Shelley Armitage charts a unique rediscovery of the largely unknown land, a journey at once deeply personal and far-reaching in its exploration of the connections between memory, spirit, and place.
Armitage begins her narrative with the intention to walk the llano from her family farm thirty meandering miles along the Middle Alamosa Creek to the Canadian River. Along the way she recovers the voices of ancient, Native, and Hispano peoples, their stories interwoven with her own: her father’s legacy, her mother’s decline, a brother’s love. The Llano holds not only the beauty of ecological surprises but a renewed realization of kinship in a world ever-changing.
Read Lone Star Literary Life’s review here.
TEXAS HISTORY/TRUE CRIME
Skip Hollandsworth
The Midnight Assassin: Panic, Scandal, and the Hunt for America’s First Serial Killer
Henry Holt, 978-0-8050-9762-2, hardback (also available as an ebook and on Audible), 336 pgs., $30.00
April 5, 2016
In the late 1800s, the city of Austin, Texas, was on the cusp of emerging from an isolated western outpost into a truly cosmopolitan metropolis. But beginning in December 1884, Austin was terrorized by someone equally as vicious and, in some ways, far more diabolical than London’s infamous Jack the Ripper. For almost exactly one year, the Midnight Assassin crisscrossed the entire city, striking on moonlit nights, using axes, knives, and long steel rods to rip apart women from every race and class. At the time the concept of a serial killer was unthinkable, but the murders continued, the killer became more brazen, and the citizens’ panic reached a fever pitch.
Before it was all over, at least a dozen men would be arrested in connection with the murders, and the crimes would expose what a newspaper described as “the most extensive and profound scandal ever known in Austin.” And yes, when Jack the Ripper began his attacks in 1888, London police investigators did wonder if the killer from Austin had crossed the ocean to terrorize their own city.
With vivid historical detail and novelistic flair, Texas Monthly journalist Skip Hollandsworth brings this terrifying saga to life. Read Lone Star Literary Life’s review here.
Read our Lone Star Listens interview with author Skip Hollandsworth here.
TRUE CRIME
Beverly Lowry
Who Killed These Girls?: Cold Case: The Yogurt Shop Murders
Alfred A. Knopf
Hardcover, 978-0-3075-9411-2 (also available as an ebook and on Audible), 400 pgs., $27.95
October 2016
From the author of Crossed Over, another masterful account of a horrible crime: the murder of four girls, countless other ruined lives, and the evolving complications of the justice system that frustrated the massive attempts–for twenty-five years now–to find and punish those who committed it.
The facts are brutally straightforward. On December 6, 1991, the naked, bound-and-gagged bodies of the four girls–each one shot in the head–were found in an I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt! shop in Austin, Texas. Grief, shock, and horror spread out from their families and friends to overtake the city itself. Though all branches of law enforcement were brought to bear, the investigation was often misdirected and after eight years only two men (then teenagers) were tried; moreover, their subsequent convictions were eventually overturned, and Austin PD detectives are still working on what is now a very cold case. Over the decades, the story has grown to include DNA technology, false confessions, and other developments facing crime and punishment in contemporary life. But this story belongs to the scores of people involved, and from them Beverly Lowry has fashioned a riveting saga.
Read Lone Star Literary Life’s review here.
TRUE CRIME
Laura Tillman
The Long Shadow of Small Ghosts: Murder and Memory in an American City
Scribner
Hardcover 978-1-5011-0425-1 (also available as an ebook and on Audible), 256 pgs., $26.00
April 5, 2016
In Cold Blood meets Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s Random Family: A harrowing, profoundly personal investigation of the causes, effects, and communal toll of a deeply troubling crime—the brutal murder of three young children by their parents in the border city of Brownsville, Texas.
On March 11, 2003, in Brownsville, Texas—one of America’s poorest cities—John Allen Rubio and Angela Camacho murdered their three young children. The apartment building in which the brutal crimes took place was already rundown, and in their aftermath a consensus developed in the community that it should be destroyed. It was a place, neighbors felt, that was plagued by spiritual cancer.
In 2008, journalist Laura Tillman covered the story for The Brownsville Herald. The questions it raised haunted her, particularly one asked by the sole member of the city’s Heritage Council to oppose demolition: is there any such thing as an evil building? Her investigation took her far beyond that question, revealing the nature of the toll that the crime exacted on a city already wracked with poverty. It sprawled into a six-year inquiry into the larger significance of such acts, ones so difficult to imagine or explain that their perpetrators are often dismissed as monsters alien to humanity. Read Lone Star Literary Life’s review here.
TEXAS HISTORY/PHOTOGRAPHY/ESSAYS
Marti Corn
The Ground on Which I Stand: Tamina, a Freedmen’s Town
Texas A&M University Press
Hardcover, 978-1-6234-9376-9 (also available as an ebook), 160 pgs., $40.00
June 6, 2016
In 1871, newly freed slaves established the community of Tamina—then called “Tammany”—north of Houston, near the rich timber lands of Montgomery County. Located in proximity to the just-completed railroad from Conroe to Houston, the community benefited from the burgeoning local lumber industry and available transportation. The residents built homes, churches, a one-room school, and a general store.
Over time, urban growth has had a powerful impact on Tamina. The sprawling communities of The Woodlands, Shenandoah, Chateau Woods, and Oak Ridge have encroached, introducing both opportunity and complication, as the residents of this rural community enjoy both the benefits and the challenges of urban life. On the one hand, the children of Tamina have the opportunity to attend some of the best public schools in the nation; on the other hand, residents whose education and job skills have not kept pace with modern society are struggling for survival.
Through striking and intimate photography and sensitively gleaned oral histories, Marti Corn has chronicled the lives, dreams, and spirit of the people of Tamina. The result is a multi-faceted portrait of community, kinship, values, and shared history. Read Lone Star Literary Life’s review here.
TEXAS ECOLOGY / REFERENCE
David Todd and Jonathan Ogren, with foreword by Andrew Sansom
The Texas Landscape Project: Nature and People
Texas A&M University Press
Paperback, 978-1-623-49372-1 (also available as an ebook), 288 pgs., $45.00
June 14, 2016
The Texas Landscape Project explores conservation and ecology in Texas by presenting a highly visual and deeply researched view of the widespread changes that have affected the state as its population and economy have boomed and as Texans have worked ever harder to safeguard its bountiful but limited natural resources. Covering the entire state, from Pineywoods bottomlands and Panhandle playas to Hill Country springs and Big Bend canyons, the project examines a host of familiar and not so familiar environmental issues.
A companion volume to The Texas Legacy Project, this book tracks specific environmental changes that have occurred in Texas using more than 300 color maps, expertly crafted by cartographer Jonathan Ogren, and over 100 photographs that coalesce to fashion a broad portrait of the modern Texas landscape. The rich data, compiled by author David Todd, are presented in clearly written yet marvelously detailed text that gives historical context and contemporary statistics for environmental trends connected to the land, water, air, energy, and built world of the second-largest and second-most populated state in the nation.
An engaging read for any environmentalist or conscientious citizen, The Texas Landscape Project provides a true sense of the grand scope of the Lone Star State and the high stakes of protecting it.
Read Lone Star Literary Life’s review here.
MEMOIR/BIOGRAPHY
Robert L. Seltzer, with introduction by Naomi Shihab Nye
Amado Muro and Me: A Tale of Honesty and Deception
Texas Christian University Press
Paperback, 978-0-87565-636-6, 224 pgs., $22.95
September 16, 2016
In Amado Muro and Me, ten-year-old Robert Seltzer discovers that his father, Chester, actually leads two lives—one as a newspaperman and father who somehow always knows what his son is thinking; the other as Amado Muro, a passionate and gifted writer whose pseudonym is adapted from the name of his Mexican immigrant wife.
Chester was born in Cleveland, Ohio, but in Amado Muro’s stories, he channels an intense love of Mexican culture to create deep, strong roots in Chihuahua, Mexico. Throughout the pivotal year of this memoir, the family moves from El Paso, Texas, (home to Robert’s Mexican grandmother, Alita, and always home to Robert) to Bakersfield, California. Robert experiences everything from bullying and young love to racism and cross-culturalization. Chester guides his son through this difficult period with the wisdom he gained from the “dark turn” he himself faced as a young man. Robert, who knows his father as “the old man,” now begins to learn about “Young Chess.”
Tying it all together is Amado Muro, who from time to time abandons Robert and his mother and hops freight trains in order to write his wonderful stories. Reaching beyond background research, Chester’s alter ego lives the life in order to share the tale. Robert’s ethnicity is the result of his mother’s ancestry, but his father chooses his Mexican identity. It is through this perspective, as a man who sees bridges where others see barriers, that the father helps his son deal with his first, jarring experience of racism and so much more.
Read Lone Star Literary Life’s review here.
MEMOIR
Julissa Arce
Center Street (a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc.)
Hardcover, 978-1-4555-4024-2 (also available as an ebook, an audio book, and on Audible), 304 pgs., $27.00
September 13, 2016
What does an undocumented immigrant look like? What kind of family must she come from? How could she get into this country? What is the true price she must pay to remain in the United States?
Julissa Arce knows firsthand that the most common, preconceived answers to those questions are sometimes far too simple — and often just plain wrong.
On the surface, Arce’s story reads like a how-to manual for achieving the American dream: growing up in an apartment on the outskirts of San Antonio, she worked tirelessly, achieved academic excellence, and landed a coveted job on Wall Street, complete with a six-figure salary. The level of professional and financial success that she achieved was the very definition of the American dream. But in this brave new memoir, Arce digs deep to reveal the physical, financial, and emotional costs of the stunning secret that she, like many other high-achieving, successful individuals in the United States, had been forced to keep not only from her bosses, but even from her closest friends.
From the time she was brought to this country by her hardworking parents as a child, Arce — the scholarship winner, the honors college graduate, the young woman who climbed the ladder to become a vice president at Goldman Sachs — had secretly lived as an undocumented immigrant. In this surprising, at times heart-wrenching, but always inspirational personal story of struggle, grief, and ultimate redemption, Arce takes readers deep into the little-understood world of a generation of undocumented immigrants in the United States today — people who live next door, sit in your classrooms, work in the same office, and may very well be your boss. Read Lone Star Literary Life’s review here.
HISTORY/BIOGRAPHY
Alexandra Zapruder
Twenty-Six Seconds: A Personal History of the Zapruder Film
Twelve Books
Hardcover, 978-1-4555-7481-0 (also available as an ebook, an audio book, and on Audible), 480 pgs., $27.00
November 15, 2016
The moving, untold family story behind Abraham Zapruder’s film footage of the Kennedy assassination and its lasting impact on our world.
Abraham Zapruder didn’t know when he began filming President Kennedy’s motorcade on November 22, 1963, that his home movie would change not only his family’s life but American culture and history, as well. Now his granddaughter tells the whole story of the Zapruder film for the first time. With the help of personal family records, previously sealed archival sources, and interviews, she traces the film’s complex journey through history, considering its impact on her family and the public realms of the media, courts, Federal government, and the arts community. Part biography, part family history, and part historical narrative, Andrea Zapruder shows how 26 seconds of film changed a family and raised some of the most important social, cultural, and moral questions of our time.
Read Lone Star Literary Life’s review here.
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