{"id":1150,"date":"2018-12-31T15:55:24","date_gmt":"2018-12-31T15:55:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/?p=1150"},"modified":"2018-12-31T15:55:24","modified_gmt":"2018-12-31T15:55:24","slug":"lone-star-book-reviewsby-michelle-newby-nbcccontributing-editor-118","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/?p=1150","title":{"rendered":"Lone Star Book ReviewsBy Michelle Newby, NBCCContributing Editor"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/div>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/span>Michelle Newby<\/span> is a reviewer for Kirkus Reviews<\/span> and Foreword Reviews, <\/span>writer, blogger at TexasBookLover.com, member of the Permian Basin Writers’ Workshop advisory committee, and a moderator for the Texas Book Festival. Her reviews appear in Pleiades Magazine, Rain Taxi, Concho River Review, Mosaic Literary Magazine, Atticus Review, The Rumpus, PANK Magazine,<\/span> and The Collagist.<\/span><\/p>\n

Lone Star Book Reviews
of Texas books appear weekly
at LoneStarLiterary.com<\/a><\/span><\/h1>\n
\n
\n

Carolyn Osborn <\/span>graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a Journalism degree in 1955, and an M.A. in 1959. She has won awards from P.E.N., the Texas Institute of Letters, and a Distinguished Prose Award from The Antioch Review (2003). Her stories have been included in\u00a0 numerous anthologies.<\/p>\n

Osborn is the author of two novels, Contrary People<\/span> (Wings Press, 2012) and Uncertain Ground<\/span> (Wings Press,2009), a memoir, Durations<\/span> (Wings Press, 2017), and four collections of short stories, including A Horse of Another Color<\/span> (University of Illinois Press, 1977), The Fields of Memory <\/span>(Shearer Publishing, 1984), Warriors & Maidens<\/span> (Texas Christian University Press, 1991) and Where We Are Now<\/span> (Wings Press, 2014).<\/p>\n

The Book Club of Texas published an illustrated, specially bound edition of her story, The Grands<\/span> (1990). In 2009, she received the Lon Tinkle Lifetime Achievement Award from the Texas Institute of Letters.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\n

MEMOIR\/ESSAYS<\/p>\n

Carolyn Osborn<\/span><\/p>\n

Durations: A Memoir and Personal Essays<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Wings Press<\/span><\/p>\n

Paperback, 978-1-6094-0544-1, (also available as an e-book), 200 pgs., $16.95<\/p>\n

September 1, 2017<\/p>\n

Carolyn Osborn is a grande dame of Texas letters. <\/span>She has won awards from PEN and The Antioch Review, and the Lon Tinkle Lifetime Achievement Award from the Texas Institute of Letters. Several of her short stories have been anthologized, including in The O. Henry Awards<\/span> (Doubleday, 1990) and Lone Star Literature<\/span> (Norton, 2003); she is the author of four short story collections and two novels.<\/p>\n

Durations: A Memoir and Personal Essays <\/span>is Osborn\u2019s newest book. \u201cDurations\u201d is a recounting of her childhood in the United States during World War II, and the volume includes seven recent essays; several of these works have been previously published in various forms in such journals as the University of North Texas\u2019s American Literary Review<\/span> and Southern Methodist University\u2019s Southwest Review.<\/span><\/p>\n

Osborn was five years old when the United States officially entered World War II following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December of 1941. Rather than continue frequent relocations according to her husband\u2019s Army orders, Osborn\u2019s mother chose to return to her Tennessee home \u201cfor the duration,\u201d a phrase Osborn understood as \u201cnobody knows how long.\u201d<\/p>\n

Osborn\u2019s mother suffered, unbeknownst to Osborn, from schizophrenia and was hospitalized while Osborn\u2019s father was away training troops. Osborn and her brother were taken in by the aunts of their extended Southern family, but lived in different households until the end of the war when their father remarried, and the family regrouped and decamped for Texas. I was lucky to hear Osborn speak passionately about mental illness at the Texas Book Festival this year, about the necessity of talking about it openly and without shame, banishing stigma. Osborn didn\u2019t talk to her mother or see her again until she was a grown woman with children of her own, a heartbreaking and unnecessary tragedy.<\/p>\n

A series of vignettes firmly grounded in the alien atmosphere of a country at war (\u201ca vast and terrible confusion that had already hospitalized my mother, divided my brother and me, and threated to kill my father and uncle\u201d), Osborn\u2019s account of her early life playing out against the backdrop of world history is moving and important. These are valuable memories of a generation that will be lost to us in the not-too-distant future. Osborn has an understated style that speaks volumes.<\/p>\n

Her teenage years take place against the backdrop of Texas\u2019s transition from a rural to an urban state. Cultural adjustments were necessary, leaving a genteel Southern existence for the West, where \u201cthe sun wouldn\u2019t quit shining and drugstore cowboys decorated the streets,\u201d and football pep rallies where the team sat \u201clike visiting royalty watching the antics of the common people.\u201d<\/p>\n

Osborn\u2019s frequently funny (\u201cI learned I was morally lacking in many ways but I tended to forget which ones\u201d); astute (\u201cShe was personally as antiseptic as her always clean white uniform\u201d); and observant (an aunt\u2019s suitor had a \u201cbeseeching face, making him look as if you knew the answer to something he needed to know\u201d).<\/p>\n

The essays following \u201cDurations\u201d address the everyday mundane and everyday extraordinary in a wide range of subjects, from guns to Hill Country ranching to ambivalent travel essays, evidencing a naturalist bent. These are a gentle read, musing and insightful.<\/p>\n

Osborn learned the art of storytelling from her aunts. We can thank those steel magnolias, \u201ccuriosity, that great provoker,\u201d and \u201cwhim, that small action that changes everything,\u201d for the gift of Carolyn Osborn.<\/p>\n

* * * * *<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Michelle Newby is a reviewer for Kirkus Reviews and Foreword Reviews, writer, blogger at TexasBookLover.com, member of the Permian Basin Writers’ Workshop advisory committee, and a moderator for the Texas Book Festival. Her reviews appear in Pleiades Magazine, Rain Taxi, Concho River Review, Mosaic Literary Magazine, Atticus Review, The Rumpus, PANK Magazine, and The Collagist. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1150","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1150","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1150"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1150\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1150"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1150"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}