Contributing Editor
BIOGRAPHY
Nigel Cliff
Moscow Nights: The Van Cliburn Story – How One Man and His Piano Transformed the Cold War
Harper
Hardcover, 978-0-0623-3316-2, 464 pages, $28.99 (also available as paperback and ebook)
Reviewed by Si Dunn
Picture 100,000 people jammed onto sidewalks cheering as a ticker-tape parade surged through New York City.
This time, it wasn’t an astronaut, conquering general, or world-champion athlete riding high in the back of a Lincoln Continental convertible. It was Harvey Lavan “Van” Cliburn, a twenty-three-year-old concert pianist from Kilgore, Texas.
America’s Cold War with the Soviet Union was at its height. Yet Van Cliburn was being celebrated because had just returned from Moscow. He had stunned the world by winning the first International Tchaikovsky Piano Competition. >>READ MORE
Texas ReadsGlenn Dromgoole
>> archive
Historians explore special moments in Texas history
Fifteen prominent Texas historians were invited to answer this question: “At what moment in Texas history would you have liked to have been a ‘fly on the wall’ and why?” Their responding essays constitute a compelling new book, Eavesdropping on Texas History (University of North Texas Press, $29.95 hardcover), edited by Mary L. Scheer, who also contributed one of the pieces.
Scheer, who teaches history at Lamar University, said the project grew out of the premise that history “is inherently interesting, intriguing, instructive, and fun.”
“Like many other historians and writers,” she added, “I have often thought about a particular event or moment and amusingly wished I’d been there to eavesdrop on history.”
Of course, the day the Alamo fell was one of the events cited. The raid that recaptured Cynthia Ann Parker from the Comanches was another, as was the day that Governor Sam Houston refused to take a loyalty oath to the Confederacy. Other historians chose such widely diverse topics as the Black Sunday dust storm “of biblical proportions” in the Panhandle in 1935, the SMU-TCU football “game of the century” in 1935, the establishment of Texas Southern University in 1947, and the day Lyndon B. Johnson became president after the assassination of John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963.
At the end of each story, the historians offer brief personal observations as to why they would have liked to be the proverbial “fly on the wall” for that particular event. If you like Texas history, there’s a lot of good reading in this collection.
Western novel: San Angelo author Mike Thompson spins quite a tale in The Turbulent Trail (Five Star, $25.95 hardcover), a western novel featuring the life and hard times — and yet incredibly good luck -— of Charlie Deegan. We pick up Charlie in a Yuma prison where he is doing ten years of hard time for killing a man in a barroom knife fight. Charlie was quite drunk at the time, but his actions were all in self-defense.
Nevertheless, he finds himself in a virtually escape-proof Yuma prison, again having to kill a man in self-defense. Charlie figures it’s time to make his unlikely getaway, and when his plan works he then has to stay ahead of the dogs and men on horseback and a vengeful Indian tracker. Charlie Deegan is resourceful and tough. And fate smiles on him time after time, just when it looks like Charlie can’t possibly get out of this next situation alive.
Charlie dreams of escaping the desert and joining a trail driving outfit, but first he has to come to terms with the fact that liquor keeps getting him in bad trouble. The reader can’t help but pull for Charlie Deegan to make it.
Glenn Dromgoole’s latest book is West Texas StoriesContact him at g.dromgoole@suddenlink.net.
>> Check out his previous Texas Reads columns in Lone Star Literary Life
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Berkley Publishing Group
Paperback, 978-0-4514-8811-4 (also available as an e-book and on Audible), 400 pgs., $16.00
February 7, 2017
“The dead sometimes remain and nothing good has ever come from sticking around.”
Eighteen-year-old Dahlia Waller left the small East Texas town of Aurora right after high school graduation and never looked back. Fifteen difficult, disappointing years later she returns, moving in with her mother, Memphis, determined to finally get some answers to her past. Who is Dahlia’s father? Why did she and her mother move so often, usually in the middle of the night (“another one of her cloak-and-dagger operations”)? Why did Dahlia not attend school until the eighth grade? Why did Memphis never sign a lease or take a job that required paperwork? “This child [Dahlia] has called on fate to stomp its foot, determined to resolve itself.”
When Dahlia discovers the body of a woman half-buried alive in what locals call the “Whispering Woods,” she sets a series of events in motion that upend her life and the lives of everyone around her. The secrets her mother has kept for half a lifetime begin to emerge and unleash a chain of events that we’re not sure they can survive. >>READ MORE
University of Texas Press
Hardcover, 978-1-4773-1089-4, 160 pgs., $40.00; Nov. 2016
“Seeing and engaging with original evidence of the past informs our understanding of Texas and makes meaning of the present.”
The late, great Bob Bullock, lieutenant governor of Texas from 1991 to 1998, began discussing the idea of a Texas state history museum in 1995: “As great as this state is, we have no state museum in our state capital, a magnificent museum where our history can be properly displayed.” As happened so often, Bullock wished it, and it was done. One of his last public appearances was at the groundbreaking ceremony for the museum in April of 1999. Sadly, he did not get to see his pride and joy open to the public in 2001.
Seeing Texas History: The Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum, edited by Victoria Ramirez, the museum’s director, with an introduction by Ramirez and Jan Bullock, is a coffee-table format book celebrating fifteen years of original artifacts on display and special exhibitions at the official state history museum of Texas. >>READ MORE
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