Contributing Editor
TEXAS HISTORY
Carol Dawson with Roger Allen Polson
Geoff Appold, Photo Editor
Foreword by Willie Nelson
Miles and Miles of Texas: 100 Years of the Texas Highway Department
Texas A&M University Press
Hardcover, 8.5 x 11, 978-1-62349-456-8, 368 pages; 147 color, 247 b&w photos, 7 maps; bibliography; index. $39.95
September 2016
Reviewed by Barbara Brannon
On April 4, 1917, Texas made a monumental leap into the modern era — though it was the forty-fifth state of forty-eight to do so. With some 200,000 automobiles already choking its paltry thousand miles of roads, Texas at last realized that its size alone would qualify it to collect more than any other state of the bonanza set aside by the Federal Aid Road Act of 1916. States were mandated to establish a highway department in order to qualify for funding. Gov. James Ferguson was the official who signed the Texas Highway Department into existence that day. >>READ MORE
Texas ReadsGlenn Dromgoole
>> archive
Picture book tells story of rodeo cowgirl Tad Lucas
Houston author Laura B. Edge has written a picture book biography, Tad Lucas: Trick Riding Rodeo Cowgirl (Pelican, $16.99), illustrated by Texas artist Stephanie Ford.
Lucas (1902–1990), who performed in rodeos and Wild West shows from the 1920s until her retirement in 1958, is considered the greatest rodeo cowgirl of all time, according to the Texas State Historical Association. She is the only person elected to all three rodeo halls of fame — the National Rodeo Hall of Fame in 1967 (first woman elected), the National Cowgirl Hall of Fame in 1978, and the Pro Rodeo Hall of Fame in 1979. Upon her death in Fort Worth, her will established the Tad Lucas Award honoring women who excel in any field related to western heritage.
Lucas was born Barbara Barnes in Nebraska, the youngest of twenty-four children. “She didn’t crawl like most babies; she slithered,” Edge notes. “Her dad thought she looked like a tadpole. The name stuck, and everyone called her Tad. She learned to ride almost before she could walk. By the time she was seven, she was helping her dad tame wild horses.”
The family moved to Fort Worth, and at a rodeo there she met bronc rider Buck Lucas. They married and spent their honeymoon on a ship to England with a Wild West show. She suffered a major riding injury at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1933 and was told she would never ride again. “She was back in the saddle trick riding in a year,” Edge writes. She and her daughter, Mitzi, performed trick riding routines together for twenty years.
Young readers: Dallas journalist, author, and humorist Michael Merschel has written Revenge of the Star Survivors (Holiday House, $17.95 hardcover), a 320-page humorous sci-fi novel for ages 10-14.
“My situation is desperate,” the novel begins. “I have crash-landed in an inhospitable world. I am surrounded by aliens. Hundreds of them. All hostile. They look humanoid, but so far I have been unable to make sense of their primitive social order.”
This is Clark Sherman’s reaction to being enrolled in the eighth grade at Festus Middle School. Read more at HolidayHouse.com.
Cookbook: Stan McDonald of Big Lake has published his own cookbook, The Texas Chef: Down Home Texas ($20 spiral-bound). The eighty-nine recipes are organized into nine categories: breakfast, soups, party foods, vegetables and sides, poultry and fowl, pork, beef, seafood, and desserts.
A few gems: Grandma’s corn cakes, Texas kolaches, catfish stew, bacon deviled eggs, ranch style vegetables, chicken and dumplings Texas style, slow roasted BBQ ribs, Little Hoss Ranch pot roast, Hill Country roasted oysters, and no-churn cinnamon banana ice cream. For more information, and to order the book, see his website, www.thetexaschef.com.
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
2017 Dallas Book Festival set for April 29
Partnership with Festival of Ideas to create unprecedented community event
National Book Award Winner Andrew Solomon and acclaimed authors Greg Iles, Paulette Jiles, Eric Litwin and Kristen Radke headline the 2017 Dallas Book Festival, a day-long celebration of literature, arts and culture on Sat., April 29.
For the first time, the annual Book Festival is being held in conjunction with the Dallas Festival of Ideas, a series of forums, seminars and discussions about the city’s future, for a unique, unprecedented event in downtown Dallas.
The Book Festival will take place on all eight floors of the J. Erik Jonsson Central Library, 1515 Young St. The Festival of Ideas will be centered across the street at Dallas City Hall. The two festivals will combine for the closing session, featuring a conversation with novelist Yaa Gyasi, with complementary programming throughout the day. All events are free and open to the public.
The full schedule will be available soon at www.dallasbookfestival.org. Details of the Festival of Ideas can be found at http://thedallasfestival.com.
The Book Festival, which began in 2006, drew more than 4,000 people last year. It features dozens of authors in individual presentations, interviews about their work or taking part in panels. Among the notable writers participating in the 2017 event are:
• Andrew Solomon, who won the National Book Award for The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, and is a noted authority on mental health.
• Kristen Radtke, a writer and illustrator whose appearance coincides with the release of her graphic memoir, Imagine Wanting Only This.
• Paulette Jiles, a novelist and poet whose most recent book, News of the World, was a National Book Award finalist.
• Eric Litwin, a musician and best-selling author of children’s books who inaugurated the popular Pete the Cat series.
• Greg Iles, whose 15 novels include the best-selling Natchez Burning and The Bone Tree and the forthcoming Mississippi Blood, to be released March 21. Iles will be featured in conversation with Stanley Nelson, editor of the Concordia (La.) Sentinel, whose investigations of the Ku Klux Klan and unsolved racially motivated murders in the region inspired many of Iles’s books. >>READ MORE
University of New Mexico Press
Paperback, 978-0-8263-5792-2, (also available as an e-book), 192 pgs., $19.95
March 1, 2017
“Normal? ¿Normal? ¿Que es normal?”
Fight Like a Man and Other Stories We Tell Our Children is reporter Christine Granados’s first collection of short fiction, comprising seven stories and the eponymous novella. Many of these stories were previously published in such literary journals as Huizache Magazine and Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas. This is a strong collection, mostly set in El Paso, Texas, featuring working-class characters, both Anglo and Latin@, chafing against the frequently uncomfortable ties that bind.
The novella Fight Like a Man is a standout. Moníca is middle-aged, married with two teenagers, when she discovers herself pregnant by her younger lover. As she debates her options, Moníca and her half-sister must decide what to do with the ashes of their father, long-deceased, who had two families—one in Juárez and another in El Paso. Moníca is more like her father than she’d like to admit, and so is her lover. It’s complicated. >>READ MORE
Ballantine Books
Hardcover, 978-1-1018-8715-8, (also available as an e-book and on Audible), 240 pgs., $27.00
February 21, 2017
“There are many ways to become a mother.”
Hyland and Suzette Kendall, an architect and a heart surgeon, respectively, have been happily married, settled into successful lives, for fifteen years. They’ve made the mutual (more or less) decision not to have children before they married, but Hyland, in some sort of mid-life crisis (“Is this it? Is that all?”), decides what’s missing from his life is a child. He wants to have a baby and, due to Suzette’s concerns about passing on a familial tendency to mental illness, suggests they use a surrogate mother. Twenty-one-year-old Dorrie, a literary sort who currently works feeding penguins at an aquarium on Galveston Island, needs the money for college, which she cannot otherwise afford. A conflicted Suzette reluctantly agrees, and her carefully controlled life, constructed to stave off uncertainty and ambiguity, threatens to buckle, along with her equilibrium. >>READ MORE
Leave a Reply