{"id":1105,"date":"2018-12-31T15:40:40","date_gmt":"2018-12-31T15:40:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/?p=1105"},"modified":"2018-12-31T15:40:40","modified_gmt":"2018-12-31T15:40:40","slug":"lone-star-reviewsmichelle-newby-nbcc-85","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/?p=1105","title":{"rendered":"Lone Star ReviewsMichelle Newby, NBCC,"},"content":{"rendered":"
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<\/span><\/span>Lone Star Reviews<\/span>Michelle Newby, NBCC,<\/span><\/h1>\n<\/div>\n

Contributing Editor<\/span><\/h1>\n
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<\/span><\/span><\/span>Texas Reads<\/span>Glenn Dromgoole<\/span><\/h1>\n

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Author looks at black high school football in Texas before integration<\/h1>\n

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<\/a><\/span><\/span>Historian, journalist, and author Michael Hurd <\/span>has produced the very readable and authoritative Thursday Night Lights: The Story of Black High School Football in Texas<\/span><\/a><\/span> (University of Texas Press, $24.95 hardcover).<\/p>\n

\u201cThis book,\u201d writes Hurd, director of Prairie View A&M\u2019s Texas Institute for the Preservation of History and Culture, \u201cis about \u2018black folks\u2019 who coached and played high school football behind the veil of segregation in Texas for half a century, 1920\u20131970, as members of the all-black Prairie View Interscholastic League.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hurd explains the book\u2019s title: The all-black schools played their games \u201cprimarily on Wednesday and Thursday nights in most towns, Tuesdays in others, some on Saturdays, but rarely on prime-time Friday nights, when games for white schools were played.\u201d<\/p>\n

The author includes a six-page section on Abilene\u2019s Carter G. Woodson High School Rams, featuring a get-together of several former players swapping tales about playing for Coach James Valentine and hanging out eating \u201cthe best burgers in Abilene\u201d at Larry\u2019s drive-in after their games.<\/p>\n

At one out-of-town game, they remembered, the team bus pulled in to a service station to fill up with gas. But when the players were denied use of the station\u2019s restroom, Coach Valentine ordered the white attendant, \u201cShut that pump off! We don\u2019t want to fill up here!\u201d<\/p>\n

The book includes photographs of former Woodson players Andrew Penns and Louis Kelley.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe PVIL football honor roll,\u201d Hurd writes, \u201creads like a who\u2019s who of national prep, college and professional gridiron greats,\u201d with six of them in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. In the first combined NFL-AFL pro football draft of 1967, five of the first thirty-three draft picks were former PVIL players.<\/p>\n

\u201cBlack high school football flourished in a time when it seemed no one outside the black media and its audiences cared about \u2026 the abundance of talent bursting from the underfunded schools that competed under the PVIL banner,\u201d Hurd notes.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe PVIL created pride and ambition, and its games revived spirits battered by the day-to-day burdens of racism\u2026. For black players, the game was a vehicle to propel them from poor hardworking disenfranchised communities into better lives that could include a college education.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cMean\u201d Joe Greene, Bubba Smith, Dick \u201cNight Train\u201d Lane, Jerry LeVias, Ollie Matson, and Charley Taylor all played at PVIL schools, to name just a few. The late Barbara Jordan, the first black woman elected to Congress from a southern state, was a PVIL debate champion.<\/p>\n

Hurd tells about some of the legendary coaches, teams, and rivalries in the PVIL, including the Houston matchup of Wheatley vs. Yates played for years on Thanksgiving Day, and the extraordinary talent coming out of Beaumont\u2019s Hebert and Charlton-Pollard high schools.<\/p>\n

The last chapter deals with integration of the University Interscholastic League in 1967 \u2014 \u201cthe good, the bad, the end\u201d \u2014 that closed the books on the PVIL three years later.<\/p>\n

Hurd tells the PVIL story with conviction, attention to detail, and great affection.<\/p>\n

Glenn Dromgoole\u2019s<\/span> latest book is West Texas Stories<\/span><\/a><\/span>Contact him at g.dromgoole@suddenlink.net.<\/p>\n

>> <\/span>Check out his previous Texas Reads columns in Lone Star Lit<\/a><\/span>erary Life<\/span><\/h1>\n

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Paperback, 978-0-9968-7974-3 (also available as an e-book), 216 pgs., $11.99<\/p>\n

October 20, 2017<\/p>\n

Nineteen is \u201csort of an itchy age, especially in a family whose motto was \u2018Hold My Beer and Watch This.\u2019<\/span>\u201d Juan Antonio Augustus \u201cAugie\u201d Sweetwater is nineteen, and has gone missing during a business trip to Mexico. Charlie, great uncle to Augie, quoting Gandhi, Thoreau, and John Lennon, philosophically feeling each of his sixty-eight years (\u201cLately he had begun to wonder if most of his dreams and adventures lay behind him, and if the whole of his life amounted to less than the sum of its parts\u201d), heads to Veracruz to begin working his way up the coast. Raul, father of Augie, nephew of Charlie, crosses the border into Matamoros to begin working his way down the coast. Surely one of them will find Augie.<\/p>\n

Old friends and business associates are behaving evasively, acting shady. Clues point in a gruesome direction: kidnapping, human trafficking, sea-slaves, cartels, corrupt public servants (\u201cPlata o plomo,<\/span> as they say. Silver or lead\u201d), dissolute musicians, poachers, repo-women, plutocrats, and pirates, though those last two are synonyms.<\/p>\n

Hidden Sea<\/span> is the new novel by Miles Arceneaux<\/span> (aka John T. Davis, James R. Dennis,<\/span> and Brent Douglass)<\/span>, the fifth in his (their) Gulf Coast noir series of mysteries.\u00a0 >>READ MORE<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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University of North Texas Press<\/p>\n

Hardcover, 978-1-5744-1692-3 (also available as an e-book and on Audible), 480 pgs., $29.95<\/p>\n

August 15, 2017<\/p>\n

On June 26, 2015, the Supreme Court of the United States affirmed the right to marry for all Americans<\/span> in Obergefell v. Hodges,<\/span> after forty years of \u201cstruggle and engagement, combat and persuasion, activism and conversation.\u201d Almost six hundred couples have been plaintiffs in same-sex marriage cases since 1970. In 2013, Mark Phariss and Vic Holmes of Plano, along with Cleopatra DeLeon and Nicole Dimetman of Austin, agreed to become named plaintiffs for a Texas case. Phariss and Holmes were denied a marriage license in Bexar County, and powerhouse international law firm Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, LLP, promptly filed suit. >>READ MORE<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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LONE STAR LISTENS interviews\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>>> archive<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/h1>\n

10.22.2017\u00a0 \u201cNot so much a state as a habitat\u201d: Lubbock\u2019s next poet laureate, William Wenthe, reflects on Texas as inspiration and identity<\/h1>\n

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Interviewed by Barbara Brannon<\/span><\/h1>\n

William Wenthe wasn\u2019t a Texan to start with,<\/span> but a quarter century of honing and teaching the craft of poetry here ought to qualify him as one by now. Of his four published volumes of verse, the first, <\/span>Birds of Hoboken<\/span> (1995) was published by the esteemed Orchises Press; its title signals his continuing interest in the relation between natural and human orders. The next three books have come out from Louisiana State University, whose top poetry honor, the L. E. Phillabaum Poetry Award (a tribute to the press\u2019s director emeritus, long a champion of excellent poetry) Wenthe won for his most recent collection, <\/span>God\u2019s Foolishness<\/span> (2016). (In case you\u2019re wondering about that striking cover design, it incorporates a screenprint by internationally renowned Lubbock printmaker <\/span>Lynwood Kreneck<\/span><\/p>\n

On the eve of the 2017 Lubbock Book Festival, during which he will be honored as the city\u2019s new poet laureate, Wenthe took time out to discuss, via email, topics ranging from poetic inspiration to politics, with some practical advice for writers and readers along the way.<\/p>\n

LONE STAR LITERARY LIFE:<\/span> Bill, you came to Texas Tech University in Lubbock \u2014 some years ago \u2014 by way of the University of Virginia, from an upbringing in New Jersey. Can you tell us more about your journey from East Coast to South to Southwest, and how that journey has influenced your creative development?<\/span><\/p>\n

WILLIAM WENTHE: <\/span>I\u2019ve lived in a sixth-floor walkup in Manhattan and I\u2019ve lived in a cottage in a 500-acre forest in Virginia. So I\u2019m pretty adaptable. The relation of my writing to place is really complex, and something I\u2019m always exploring. But very broadly, I did not identify with the suburban\/industrial landscape I grew up in; much of the poetry I wrote then was by way of complaint. And then I loved, just loved, the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. In Virginia, I felt I understood the place: its natural history and human history, and that deepened my writing. Moving to West Texas was a kind of geographical shock, after Virginia\u2014one of the first poems I wrote was titled \u201cAfter Moving to a Place Where I Do Not Know the Names of Plants and Birds.\u201d But after I moved here, I swore that I wouldn\u2019t let unfamiliarity stop me from writing\u00a0 >>READ MORE<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

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Texas’s only statewide, weekly calendar of book events
<\/span>Bookish Texas<\/span> event highlights\u00a0 10.22.2017 <\/span>>><\/span><\/a><\/span> GO this week\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Michelle Newby, Contributing Editor<\/span><\/h1>\n

SPECIAL EVENTS THIS WEEK<\/span><\/p>\n