James Sledd

Talking that Talk: Language Culture, and Education in African America To get honesty out of the way at once, so I can get on with the business of book-reviewing: Professor John Baugh, now of Stanford, was for some years an … Read More

Michael Harrington, the successor to Norman Thomas as Mr. Socialism U.S.A., was not unfamiliar with Austin (though he spelled the name of the great legislative watering hole, Scholz’s, with a u). “On several occasions,” Harrington wrote in Fragments of the … Read More

Every day, at 10:00 a.m. and 2:30 p.m., the Sam Houston departs its dock and tours the ship channel of the Port of Houston. The highlights of the trip include a petro-chemical processing plant that looks like a small city, … Read More

SERVING THE WORD: Literalism in America from the Pulpit to the Bench. By Vincent Crapanzano. In the spring of 1943, the jukebox in Austin’s Mr. Shorty’s (on Lake Austin Boulevard across from Tom Miller Dam) played patriotic country. It assured … Read More

THE HUMANITIES AND THE CIVIC IMAGINATION.Collected Addresses and Essays 1978—1998. MONICA’S STORY. By Andrew Morton. No more alike than the devil and St. Augustine,” a peppery humanist once remarked of an ancient text and its inferior modern translation. The same … Read More