ustxtxb_obs_1993_12_10_50_00021-00000_000.pdf

the town. He is soon hooked on the sport of tornado chasing. Other storms in his life include an affair with a Native American woman, his father’s cancer and a railroad disaster that tests his loyalty to himself and his friends. Hauptman, a Texas native, won the 1988 Jesse Jones Award for fiction by the Texas Institute of Letters for his short story collection, Good Rockin’ Tonight. Streets of Laredo, by Larry McMurtry, Simon & Schuster. The genuine sequel to the Pulitzer Prize-winning Lonesome Dove has an aging Woodrow Call hunting a Mexican train robber with an unlikely trio of helpers. “Bleak, stately, terrified and moving,” judged Kirkus Reviews. “It’s not just the wonderful story and completely original, perfectly American characters; McMurtry writes as well about aging as has ever been done.” The Uncollected Early Prose of Katherine Anne Porter, edited by Ruth M. Alvarez and Thomas F. Walsh, University of Texas. Porter’s apprenticeship as a creative writer is shown in this volume, which brings together 29 pieces with both fiction and essays, including her monograph, “Outline of Mexican Popular Arts and Crafts, her first two essays on Mexican politics and several literary sketches with Mexican themes. They offer new insights into her relationship with Mexico, a place she later said, “influenced everything I did afterward.” The Useless Servants, by Rolando Hinojosa, Arte Publico. Hinojosa explores the obscenity and pointlessness of war in the pages of a Korean War journal written by his fictional everyman, Rafe Buenrostro. Drawing from his own experiences, Hinojosa probes the mind of this Texas country boy who suddenly finds himself in an unknown country, fighting an undeclared war for an unclear reason. Hinojosa, who holds a chair in creative writing at the University of Texas at Austin, has won both the highest award for the novel in Latin America, the 1976 Casa de las Americas Prize, and the National Award for Chicano Literature in the United States. Virgin of the Rodeo, by Sarah Bird, Doubleday. Bird, in her third novel turns her perversely compassionate eye on the borderland, where the lyrical myths of the Old West clank against contemporary realities with this captivating story of a cowgirl who tours the offbeat rodeo circuit, discovering that cowboys and love can come in a variety of shapes, colors and genders. Nonfiction Always Running La Vida Loca, by Luis J. Rodriguez, Curbstone. The story of an immi grant family escaping from Juarez to Los Angeles. Rodriguez experiments with gangs until he is kicked out of one high school. When his father enrolls him in another school, he becomes interested in arts, literature and Chicano culture. It is the story that should have been_what the movies American Me and Bound by Honor were based on, because, though sinking to similar depths of rage and despair, its hero transcends the ugliness by seizing activism and waving it as a filero sharpened on a stone of hardened wisdom. See TO 8/20/93. A Month of Sundays, by Kent Biffle, University of North Texas. A collection of Biffle’ s Texana columns in the Dallas Morning News on Texas history, outlaws and other shooters, folk and folklore. As Waco author John Edward Weems wrote \(in a News yet informal and humorous, look at Texas and Texans and their many vagaries.” And If You Play Golf, You’re My Friend: Further Reflections of a Grown Caddie, by Harvey Penick, with Bud Shrake, Simon & Schuster. The sequel to Penick’s Little Red Book: Lessons and Teachings from a Lifetime in Golf, which spent 54 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller List after its publication in May 1992 and has become the bestselling hardcover sports book of all time. Both Penick and Shrake live in Austin. Barton Springs Eternal: The Soul of a City, edited by Turk Pipkin and Marshall Frech, Soft Shoe Publishing. The book is essays and interviews about the legendary springfed pool just across the Colorado River from downtown Austin. It also is about a culture trying to explain what it values, trying to find meaning and trying to express the importance of a place which is threatened by upstream development. See TO 9/17/93. The Big Thicket: An Ecological Reevaluation, by Pete A.Y. Gunter, foreword by Bob Armstrong, University of North Texas. Gunter describes not only the history and rich diversity of the region saved from real estate developers and lumber companies by the efforts of Senator Ralph Yarborough and Representative Bob Eckhardt, then of Houston. He also makes it possible to plan a trip there, with descriptions of each stream corridor unit, maps and canoeing conditions, hiking trails, camping facilities and representative flora and fauna. The Bride Wore Crimson and Other Stories, by Bryan Woolley, Texas Western. Woolley, a Dallas journalist, is consistently lucid in his writing, in style as well as concept. He recounts his own life-changing participation in Montgomery-to-Selma civil rights march of 1965; chronicles the year-long horror of a man falsely accused of sexually molesting a child; a corrective on the bad press that followed the winning of the national basketball championship by Texas Western University in 1966; and numerous personality profiles. Woolley has the rare ability to find extraordinary elements of social importance in the rhythms of the facts whose textures are all around us. See TO 9/3/93. Cartooning Texas: One Hundred Years of Cartoon Art in the Lone Star State, Maury B. Forman and Robert A. Calvert, Texas A&M. Political cartoons covering a broad range of topics from a variety of perspectives. Chronicles of Opinion on Higher Education: 1995-1975, by Harry Hunt Ransom, The University of Texas at Austin. In the latest of five volumes of commentaries on higher education issued posthumously, Ransom, in Chronicles of Opinion, challenges students and educators to overcome despair and focus on the future. Like Tomas Rivera, the UT teacher and novelist whose works were anthologized by Arte Ptiblico Press last year, Ransom was a pragmatic teacher who shared a vision about the humanizing effects of education and both have something to say about higher education in Texas at a time when respect for different cultures is under attack. See TO 7/16/93. Cooking Texas Style, by Candy Wagner and Sandra Marquez, University of Texas. This 10th anniversary edition has 60 new recipes and remains a popular seller for the university press. Corners of Texas: Publications of the Texas Folklore Society, Volume LII, edited by Francis Edward Abernethy, University of North Texas. The annual publication includes a special section on the history of the Society and some of its “sainted elders,” including J. Frank Dobie, John Lomax and Carl Hertzog, as well as some of the best of the society’s papers over the past three years, from lynchings to el pato boat builders; sunbonnets to hammered dulcimers; jokes about droughts and lawyers to tales of folk, gospel and blues music; and more. Cowgirls of the Rodeo: Pioneer Professional Athletes, by Mary Lou LeCompte, University of Illinois. Long before women got the vote, cowgirls competed against the best wranglers, male or female. They traveled all over North America, asking only that they be given the chance to win prize money while they risked their lives on the rodeo circuit. LeCompte, who teaches at the University of Texas at Austin, tells the stories of women who refused to be fenced in by social conventions, women who could out-drink, out-gamble and out-ride most cowboys. Deliberate Indifference, by Howard Swindle, THE TEXAS OBSERVER 21